He’s one of the best mentors I’ve ever had. Been doing this longer than I have, still teaches me something new almost every time we talk. So when he showed up excited about a brand new toaster and started walking me through it like it was a server rack, I paid attention.
It was a Dualit, the kind of toaster British kitchens have used for decades. Chrome body, mechanical dials, built like it would outlive both of us. He walked me through the efficiency features. A slot selector so you only heat the two slots you’re actually using instead of all four. A separate setting for bagels, so you toast one side and just warm the other instead of burning both. Real engineering, not marketing fluff.
Then he loaded a slice of plain sandwich bread, set the dials, and hit the lever.
It popped a few minutes later. One side, perfectly golden. The other side, still just bread.
He’d used the bagel setting on regular bread, in a slot dialed to warm instead of toast. The exact feature he’d been bragging about a minute earlier is the one that got him.
Here’s the part I actually think about. He didn’t get this wrong because he’s careless. He’s one of the sharpest people I know. He got it wrong because the toaster had more settings than the one he grew up using, and nobody reads the full manual on a toaster. You unbox it, you make an assumption based on every other toaster you’ve owned, and you go.
That’s exactly how businesses end up with expensive tools quietly doing the wrong thing.
We see the business version of the toaster constantly. A company buys a modern firewall with granular rules instead of one blunt on and off switch, and a rule meant for one department quietly applies to the whole building. A backup tool with smart scheduling gets set up once and nobody checks that it’s actually backing up the folder that matters. An email security tool ships with a dozen settings for a reason, and the default that gets left in place is the one built for a completely different kind of company.
None of it looks broken. The light’s on. Something happened. It just isn’t the thing you thought was happening, and you don’t find out until the day it matters.
The fix isn’t don’t buy nice things. More capable tools are usually worth it. The fix is closer to what should have happened with the toaster. Five minutes actually reading what each setting does before you trust it with something that matters. Or better, having someone who already knows the tool walk through the settings with you once, so the mistake happens on a slice of bread and not on a backup you needed.
My mentor laughed about it for a week. Sent me a picture of the toast. That’s the other half of this worth mentioning. The people who are actually good at what they do are usually the ones most willing to admit when a new tool got the better of them, and least precious about it.
If you’ve got a tool at your business quietly running on the wrong setting, we’re glad to take a look. No judgment. Everybody’s toasted the wrong side of the bread at least once.
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