Fix the sound of the ocean

A guest at the hotel I ran in Mexico once asked me to fix the sound of the ocean.

I'm not joking. She said the waves were too loud at night and could we do something about it. I was in my twenties, running guest experience for a property on the Yucatan coast, and I had no script for that one.

What I wanted to say was that the ocean is not a feature request.

What I actually did was sit with her for a few minutes. It turned out the ocean was fine. She'd gotten a phone call right before the trip, the kind that follows you onto a vacation, and the waves were just the thing her brain had landed on. We moved her to a room facing the garden. She slept. She thanked me on the way out like I'd done something clever.

The thing I did that night wasn't a solution. It was a few minutes of being unhurried in front of someone who'd lost the ability to be unhurried with herself. Then I changed her room. The room change was five percent of it.

I think about that a lot now that I make software, because software optimizes for the room change. Build the feature. Ship the fix. Move someone from A to B.

The unhurried minutes don't have an artifact. No shipped object, no measurable output. Just the part the person says thank you for without realizing what they're thanking you for.

Fifteen years later, I still don't know if that's something I'm supposed to build into the product or admit I can't.