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In case you’re not yet utterly sick of it, here’s yet another post on panic-buying (or, to use the German term, “hamstering”) of toilet paper.
You might be asking yourself what TP has to do with DevOps, and I couldn’t fault you.
But I feel compelled to ponder the psychology behind this global (by the looks of it) toilet paper frenzy.
What gives?
I have a suspicion that a certain psychological desire for safety is at work.
The world we find ourselves in today is bewildering, maybe frightening, full of unknowns.
Even panic-buying food is fraught with decisions to make: what should you buy? What will you cook with it? How long will it keep? What are going to do with your half-year supply of canned tomato soup if this pandemic blows over more quickly than expected?
Turns out, even panicking is hard work.
Compare that to the comforting simplicity of toilet paper: you can’t really buy wrong. It’s inexpensive, has essentially unlimited shelf-life, it’s purpose and application are abundantly clear.
Toilet paper is completely non-threatening.
Now, compare that to introducing meaningful DevOps practices: you’d need to take a hard look at your processes, how you work together, indeed your organisation culture (after all, tribalism between departments is a supremely powerful force at many companies).
So even daring to start is hard and scary and full of bewildering problems and hard to answer questions.
Compared to that, just buying a new software tool, or renaming your ops department to DevOps is simple, easy to comprehend, and non-threatening.
And just as useful to meaningful change as a mound of toilet paper is useful when you’re hungry.