You CAN polish a turd, but why would you want to?

Okay, the title is a little crass. Crass, but true.

Years ago I was working on fixing a mistake in a recording project. The original track the artist put down simply wasn’t very good, and as the producer, I missed it. I whiffed. The artist had long since left the studio, so I decided, in a moment of profound stupidity, that I could repair the offending track. After spending hours trying to salvage the artist’s performance, I heard someone say, “Hey man, it’s time to give up on this….you can’t polish a turd.”

After I stopped laughing, I started crying…..it was exactly what I was doing.

For three years or so, my kids watched and re-watched every episode of Mythbusters, a show where they test myths, idioms and colloquial anecdotes. In one episode, they decided to see if you could polish a turd.

I have no idea what possessed them to try this. After all, these were big TV stars who could test anything…why assault their olfactory senses with this myth? Who knows? Anyway, they discovered something I’m sure will be useful knowledge somewhere. After hours of molding and polishing, they were actually able to get the turd ball to look like a brown, shiny pool ball.

Wow. And yuck.

Sure, there are times when you have no choice but to take what you have and make the best of it. Still, most of the time we spend fixing un-fixable mistakes would be better spent throwing away what we have and starting over. Though the Mythbusters proved you can polish a turd, you know what they say… “Don’t throw good money after bad.”

I wonder if the Mythbusters will try that one?