[JC]

As sent to me by the individual...

Well, let me tell you about my ASDL experience at Lenox Mall.

So there I was, trying to buy a pair of pants. Talk about a thoroughly confusing experience! Do I want boot cut, or relaxed fit? What's the difference between wrinkle free, wrinkle resistant, no wrinkles, no iron, and never iron? After interviews were conducted with subject matter experts, I realized that the term subject matter experts can sometimes be misleading.

I tried to bring sixteen pairs of pants into the fitting room, and he informed me that I could only bring five. I told him that five cases was simply not enough to explore the combinatorial options space of his selections. He said, "the rule is you can only bring five" and I said "well, I need to run sixteen cases to build an appropriate model to make my purchase today." The salesman thought I was a little slow because I didn't seem to be catching on.

He didn't seem to understand. Fortunately, I had my computer in the trunk, so I brought it out and tried to explain it to him.

I said, "there must be at least 27 million ways to buy a pair of pants." and he said, "huh? We only have ten options." And I said, "how did you go from the nearly infinite space of combinations to only ten, and why did you pick those ten?" Because as you know, it's a pet peeve of someone's when we say "there are three options" without explaining how we arrived at those three. A simple morphological matrix (attached) reveals that there are in fact over 27 million ways to buy a pair of pants. I merely highlighted the cells for the pants that I wanted and said "I want THESE." They don't have those...

Using JMP, I made a DOE that could make a reasonable model of the pants problem with only two trips to the fitting room, which naturally minimized the expenditure of my valuable time inside the store.

For some reason, I was not asked to leave comments on their website describing my satisfaction with my purchase today...

Pat