I’m thinking of a pattern that fits many situations where a problem exists, a solution is applied and fixes 99.9% of the problem, but the remaining part of the problem is seen as just a big of a problem as the original.
For example, every weekend I trim my beard over the bathroom sink. It makes a pretty big mess with all the cut hair. So I clean it up, getting every single hair I can find, and leave. My wife will come to me sometime later on bitching about there is hair all over the sink. Well, she didn’t see the 99.99% of hairs I cleaned up, she sees 100% of the hairs I left. If she was with me while I cleaned up the original mess, she probably wouldn’t bitch about the remaining hairs, but since all she sees is the hair I didn’t clean up, she sees it as a big deal.
Bitchy wife syndrome? Mine does it too. I’ll do the dishes only to find a bowl or something in the bedroom and plop in the sink. She’ll see the bowl and yell at me “for never doing the dishes!”
I don’t know about a name, but put down a towel, covering the sink. When done, bunch up the towel and flip the whiskers into the tub/shower (shake out the towel). Run the spigot, all gone.
Subjective evidence, perhaps, as opposed to objective evidence? If your wife saw all the evidence, in the full context, her judgement might be different.
That is why I trim my beard over the trash can. Virtually all ends up in the can, any strays that land in the sink get washed down when I brush my teeth.
I think the OP is talking about the effect where you are more acutely aware of what remains behind. This effect is noticeable in many situations.
A professional musician is keenly aware of tiny mistakes (missed notes, etc.) which the audience does not notice.
Drunk driving is seen as a big problem partly because of the fact that we’ve done such a good job of reducing it, by means of creating a social stigma. The social stigma actually did improve the problem but it also raised awareness on what little part remains.
Vaccines are seen as a nuisance (or worse) precisely because they have done such an outstanding job of reducing or eliminating the diseases, to the point where we have forgotten what the diseases were like.
As you become an expert in any field, you become more and more aware of how vast and complex the subject is and just how much more there is that you have not personally learned.
So, the question remains, what is the name for this effect?
Closest I can come is some variant of the 80-20 rule. The idea is that 20% of your staff cause 80% of your problems, and this is generalisable to ideas like 20% of a job takes 80% of the time to do it.
When you were a kid at school, you probably didn’t hang out with the naughty kids, you saw your friends, so availability bias led you to think that most kids were just decent kids like you and your mates. When you become a teacher with a aeroplane perspective of the whole of the class, the little shits loom much larger than the good kids, and you come to believe that modern kids are so much worse than back in the day. Variant of the 80-20 phenomenon.
A failure of perspective? In some cases, also confirmation bias.
In others, it’s “affluenza”.
There’s also “New carpet syndrome.” That’s when you finally replace those floors likeyou always wanted - but now the walls look like crap. They need painting . . .
I don’t know the name for it, but most often when I encounter it, it’s the result of poorly defined expectations.
For example: I had a project where the objective was ‘improve performance and reliability of printing’. No metrics were set other than “look how awful it is! Make it better! Quickly!”.
I made it better (quite a lot better, actually), but because we live in the real world, it still wasn’t perfect.
So the feedback/perception from the customer was “Still not perfect, therefore things are not getting better - and therefore your service to us is worse” - objectively wrong, but there was no baseline or defined target.
This thread certainly falls into the category of “missing the real point.”
Nate: are you looking for what to call her griping, or what to call your failure to clean up completely after yourself, but think it should be okay with her?
What I see in this situation, is a woman who wants a clean sink, and a guy who wants her to be grateful that he didn’t actually leave a deuce in it. So to speak.
I work fixing things for my paltry living. If I fix most of a machine, but the customer still can’t use it, I don’t expect them to be satisfied.
No, the issue with the OP’s beard and his wife is just an example of the phenomenon he’s asking about. Can’t think what to call it, but “confirmation bias” is pretty close, I think.
Yeah, the hair in the sink is just an example of this pattern. I think the closest idea in this thread to what I’m trying to describe is TruCelt’s “New carpet syndrome”.
From my perspective, replacing the carpet makes the room look pristine because it was such a big eye-sore to begin with. From someone with a fresh perspective of the room, they don’t have the experience of the dramatic difference replacing the carpet made, so they see the crappy walls as the sore thumb.
ISTM this is in the neighborhood of “mountain out of a molehill”, with a sprinkling of the “devil horn effect”.
The “devil horn effect” is the opposite of the “halo effect”. The “halo effect” being the feeling that someone can do no wrong, and are given leeway for any possible mistakes. With the “devil horn effect” it is the feeling that someone can do no right, and every insignificant error is magnified (or as some might call it, being married to a woman).
And sometimes it IS a big deal. If you’re a cancer patient, do you want your surgeon to tell you, “We got almost all of it”? If you were a passenger on the Titanic, would you be happy to know that 99.9% of the hull wasn’t damaged by the iceberg?
As for your wife, before you went into the bathroom there was no hair in the sink. When you came out of the bathroom there was hair in the sink. From her point of view, the solution wasn’t a solution.
