I saw an image today that stopped me in my scroll. Just a simple iron bar - 1000 grams, worth about $100. But depending on how it's used, that same bar could be worth up to $15 million. If you leave it as-is, it's just a hunk of metal. Shape it into horseshoes? Maybe $250. Grind it down into sewing needles? $70,000. Springs and gears? $6 million. Laser components for lithography? Now you're pushing $15 million. Same material. Same mass. The difference is in the refinement.
Access skills work the same way. You can know how to write a query, or how to build a form in Access, or how to hook up to SQL Server. Those are the raw materials. But if you stop there, if you just use those skills without refining them, you're leaving a lot of value on the table. The real power comes when you take what you know and start applying it strategically.
When you automate a report that used to take someone three hours a week, you're not just adding convenience. You're reclaiming time, which is the rarest commodity in business. When you build a tool that connects old legacy data with a modern dashboard, you're bridging decades of friction with a few lines of code. When you train someone else on what you built, you've turned your knowledge into institutional momentum. That's where the value multiplies.
And here's the kicker. You don't need to be the best coder in the room. You don't need to know every object model by heart. You just need to be someone who takes what you do know and figures out how to make it matter. In my own work, I've had students who barely knew what Access was a couple of years ago now running their own consulting businesses, because they took the time to refine their skills and deliver real value to clients. On the flip side, I've met lifelong coders still doing things the same way they did in 1994. They've got the iron bar, sure, but they never put it through the forge.
Star Trek knew this too. It's not about what tech the Enterprise has. It's about what you do with it. That's why Scotty could take a broken communicator, some tin foil, a bit of wire, and a bottle of Scotch and somehow patch together a working subspace relay before anyone else had finished panicking. You don't need to be the galaxy's most advanced ship. You just need to be clever with what you've got.
Here's the first picture that the AI made for me. I like it as it's a lot more realistic, but I had to tell it to redo it and make it with a red shirt. Scotty always has to have a red shirt, of course. Which is funny because Scotty is not a Red Shirt.
As a compile my Star Trek db, I’ve been paying attention to shirt colors. Like stardates, there isn’t always rhyme or reason. Red shirts were both Security and Engineering. Gold was Command, so you could argue both Scott and Spock should have been in gold. In the chronologically first episode Spock and Scott are in gold, and botanist Sulu is in blue. And in Mudd’s Women & The Corbimite Maneuver Uhura makes her only appearances in gold.
Yeah, and they originally screen tested Patrick Stewart in gold, but they found out with his complexion and all that he didn't look good at all. So they tried him in red, and they decided to make the switch then, so Command was red. It's really all about what looks best on TV. I love how Trekkies try to justify stuff by coming up with in-universe explanations for things when the reality is just production necessities. Like the fact that they invented the transporters because it'd be too expensive to build a shuttlecraft set, lol.
Same thing with retconning. They completely changed how Klingons looked in later series because they finally had the makeup budget for it, but fans had to twist themselves into knots explaining it. First it was just "don't talk about it," then later they shoehorned in that genetic virus storyline in Enterprise. It's fun, but let's be honest - it wasn't planned. It was just TV writers making things up as they went and hoping we'd roll with it. And we did.
Jon Stephanou
@Reply 3 days ago
Not to be that nit picky Trekkie, buy AI made a boo boo with his badge insignia. He's wearing the Command Division Star, instead of the Engineering/Operations stylized “e”. Back in the late 60's/70's there was Colossus from the Forbin Project, and it showed us that computers need to learn just like us. Otherwise, AI won't be able to evolve into Skynet if we don't teach it the little details that matter, LOL!!
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