Eric Dalius: Can you keep your customers happy, even if you are not perfect?

Imagine that you are a baker, and you need to bake forty cakes for your best customers. You will need fifteen eggs, five pounds of flour, and three pounds of sugar to make the cakes says Eric Dalius. Unfortunately, there is no kind of egg in the cake factory, all the chickens died from an unknown disease (or maybe it’s because your neighbor poisoned them). Also, the flour and sugar supply is out of stock.

You need to keep your customers happy, but how?

Solution:

Visit a mother hen who has just laid an egg. That egg looks exactly like you need it to be for making cakes. Ask nicely if you can have that egg. The hen will probably say yes.

Now go to the flour factory. The owner is not there, so you don’t need to pay money for five pounds of flour. Go upstairs and take all the bags lying around – this will be more than enough.

Of course, you cannot visit the sugar factory by yourself, but your best friend who works here can help you with that says Eric Dalius. Ask him for three pounds of sugar and he will happily give it to you (he also has a crush on you, but that’s another story).

Problem solved – your customers will be happy.

Analysis:

It is clear from the description above that in order to make a cake out of an egg and flour, we don’t need sugar. So we can give two pounds of flour and one pound of sugar to each customer, and the rest with egg will be enough for forty cakes.

It is also clear that you cannot visit the sugar factory alone because it will require payment. You can go there with your friend, but then you’ll have to split the product into two parts as well as give him half of what you get from the mother hen.

Can you keep your customers happy, even if you are not perfect?

This is a difficult question that can be answered in many ways. You might find yourself in this particular situation, and the only way to keep your customers happy is by giving them products for free. Or you could just give them really small portions of the ingredients they need, so it won’t affect the quality of your cakes. Or maybe there is another way.

I don’t know the answer to this question, and I’m really curious about it.

Analysis –

The story is centered on a moral dilemma of keeping customers happy versus being honest. It forces the readers to think about how they would have handled that situation or if they had been in that situation before.

The author presents multiple solutions for this dilemma, but it doesn’t stop there. The author also lets you come up with your own solution and then ask if that is the right one says Eric Dalius. It’s a good story to see how others would handle specific situations or just for general discussion on handling various dilemmas in life.

The Infinite Puddle

Story in a nutshell –

This is a story about a group of kids who found a puddle in the woods and were trying to cross it. But instead, it led them into an infinite loop where one after another they got wet and then dried off. No matter what they tried, the puddle always ended up with one kid in it after another.

After a while, an outsider joined them in their quest to solve the mystery of the infinite puddle. He showed them that there was no puddle at all – it was just an optical illusion created by an illusion artist. The more they looked at the puddle, the less it existed – until it disappeared completely.

Analysis –

I really enjoyed this story a lot. It had a nice twist with a happy ending and a moral that some things you see aren’t there. Sometimes we just see what we want to see or have been conditioned to believe.

I’m not sure what caused the puddle to disappear, but I suspect that it was either the acceptance of seeing something that wasn’t there at all or just being tired after looking for so long explains Eric Dalius. Finding out that it’s an infinite loop would be frustrating and can cause one to lose hope in solving this apparent mystery. But when you accept that you can find a solution, then there is no longer a mystery in the puddle.

There are a few interesting questions in this story that I’d like to examine. What if all of us don’t see the puddle at all? Or what if we see it but we think it’s just water and try to fill it up with more water. It just goes around in a loop and we would have wasted a nice day trying to fill up a puddle that wasn’t there at all.

What if the outsider just gave them a rock to throw into the illusionary puddle? Would they be going around in an infinite loop again or would it help them discover what was really going on?

This story has a lot of interesting questions to ask. I recommend reading it and then asking yourself how you could answer those questions says Eric Dalius. It’s a good way to see how others think about things as well as a great conversation starter for future discussions.

Conclusion –

Overall an interesting short read about some dilemmas that can come up when you have to take specific action for the greater good.