All for Standards

I finished up loading the car up to go on vacation the week before last by putting my brand new $29.88 bike rack from our buddies in Bentonville, and found myself marvelling at the little metal things that you cinch down the straps with to hold the damned thing on the car. Such simple technology, so much buck bang.

And then I felt myself feeling warm, fuzzy feelings for the people that make standards for our products, culminating in the American National Standard Institute (ANSI). People get exercised all the time about the hot sweaty policemen, soldiers and firemen, heros. They are a fine lot for politicians to hold up as examples from the hustings.

But the nerds and bureacrats who make our standards get no recognition. Who sings hymns in praise of these uber-Dilberts? Think about what they do. They go to boring, oxygenless meeting after meeting after meeting building consensus around microscopic little features (thread size to the nanometer or some such), but once it's done, everything runs so smooth and cheap. It took Wall Street three years (1964 to 1967) to nail down the 12-digit code that we now call the CUSIP, but it's been doing just fine since then. Our whole economy is undergirded by a firm infrastructure of agreement. PPP, TCP/IP, HTML, 802.11.g anyone?

So we here at the Grouse raise a lukewarm diet Dr. Pepper to the not-so-evidently heroic people who slog away at our standards, whoever the hell they are.