Hear, hear. I think it’s worthwhile to find the good in everything but that doesn’t mean that we should pretend that it wasn’t bad.

As a little for instance:

Last June we did a huge network infrastructure pilot project in Windsor, CT. It was my site so I spent the two weekends beforehand prepping everything. We started at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning. I spent the next 36 straight hours troubleshooting an issue with three wireless access points. We finally bagged it and swapped the three out to replace later. When my boss’s, boss’s, boss asked about it I told him “well it almost went flawlessly, 99% went off without a hitch. If those APs had worked we wouldn’t have learned a damn thing except that I could execute perfectly. Instead, we learned exactly what impact failure to deliver would have and how to ameliorate that specific possibility.” We didn’t get bitten by that bug for the rest of the year and 11 bigger sites were converted with no appreciable downtime.

That one weekend really SUCKED for me though!