ASD and too difficult tasks

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“how long would you say it would take one of your engineers to trouble shoot a bug?”

He glared at me as if trying to figure out if I was serious then said in a very frank voice “how long is a piece of string?”

There is a joke about the American space program developing a ball-point pen that would work in zero gravity - write upside-down and even under water - while the Russians used a pencil.

Why not just use a pencil?
NASA wanted an alternative to pencils because the lead could easily break off and float away, creating a hazard to astronauts and sensitive electronics on the spacecraft. Cosmonauts also have been using Space Pens since 1969.

The Soviet space program used grease pencils, which don't have breakage problems—to access more of the writing wax, cosmonauts simply peeled away another layer of paper. The problem with a grease pencil is that it's imprecise and smudgy—it's a lot like writing with a crayon. The peeled-away paper also created waste, and bits of paper floating around a Soyuz capsule were nearly as annoying as bits of graphite floating around an Apollo capsule.

The final mark against pencils has to do with fire. Any flammable material in a high-oxygen environment is a hazard, as we all learned after the terrible fire on Apollo 1. After that tragedy, NASA sought to minimize the use of flammable materials in space capsules—and every form of pencil (traditional, mechanical, or grease) involved some amount of flammable material, even if it was just the graphite.