Reviews – familiarity gained through experience

Nowadays, anything you can buy or book or even just find out about online has been reviewed. Of course, whilst the average overall review score and number of reviews give you a quick feel as to the likely experience, they hide the complexity of highly positive and damningly negative reviews co-existing for the very same thing – and none of this tells you which one your experience will be.

My favourite definition of knowledge is “familiarity gained through experience”, and what are these reviews but that? (Barring, of course, the simply spiteful, malicious or ‘set up’ ones). We’re getting a pulse check on the experience and the ability, by reading them all verbatim, to deep dive as well.

What is it that motivates me to review something? Mostly, nothing – I feel hugely over-surveyed and draw the line utterly this side of reviewing the packaging of my Amazon parcel. Beyond that, being able to give a good review to do some good in return for a really good product, good service or a good experience. Beyond that, if I feel I have something really helpful by way of a warning to pass on to others like me – but definitely not just to be negative or vengeful when something has gone wrong.

And so to the story of the bath, which is a double fable about baths and also, by the way, curiously, about balconies.

So we have a new bathtub and overall it’s fine. This story isn’t about how hard it is to get anyone interested in doing a job like replacing a bath but there you are – it is. No, this story is about the bath that is everything it promised to be, but that has an intriguing flaw I never considered and nor did anyone else point out. The bath (which is overall fine) has a very flat top rim – and small puddles just sit there, held by surface tension, no doubt, and without the encouragement of any slope to allow gravity to drain the fluid back into the tub and thence the drain. No, drips from the shower just sit there, so you have to wipe before carelessly sitting on the bath edge. Now, the story here about learning from experience and familiarity gained from experience is that this possibility was entirely in my blind spot until I experienced it. It didn’t cross my mind. So maybe I would review the bath and point this out. Nobody has until now. It sparks many thoughts that this product has come through design, development, testing and sales without this flaw holding it back.

Now I can also offer you another well-founded insight from experience, related to this bath. The new bath is the plainest thing you can get. It replaced a Jacuzzi bath and good riddance. A Jacuzzi bath seems like a great idea and to begin with you enjoy it. But we hadn’t used it in years, meanwhile it still needed cleaning regularly. If you’re thinking of getting one, consider the voice of experience.

My mother is moving home and I’ve been helping. She started with the clear idea of a flat with a balcony. My experience of balconies is limited to hotels and holiday villas. They’re jolly nice to have but, because the whole bath thing was going on at the same time, I had the sudden realisation that a balcony is another form of Jacuzzi bath. We dropped the idea of a balcony and found lots more nice properties to look at.

These are tiny examples, but they’re real knowledge in the sense of ‘familiarity gained from experience’. They could be in the blind spot of someone who didn’t have the benefit of that experience. How might we use reviews to help pass that kind of insight on in a work context? And what new insights can we have – like mine about balconies – just by analogy?