Near the end of today before we left the office I was asked to do some organizing by Christopher. One of the tasks was dealing with maximizing the efficient use of space in the office. Being a small office, minute changes can make a huge difference. We had just received a shipment of new cans and tubes for the everything is ok project and I was asked to insert the tubes into the cans to eliminate the need for separate boxes for each.

Simple enough I thought, and started removing the cans from the box. The cans are stacked in four layers of about fifty – so it takes quite a bit of effort to remove them all. I neatly stacked them next to the big box on the ground, and started placing them back in and filling them with the tubes. Tim was working hard on something that was due by the end of the day and Christopher was dealing with a misbehaving broadband connection so I tried my best to keep the clinging and clanging of cans to a minimum. It wasn’t until I filled the box to just about the end when I realized that somehow – I had left over cans. Many more than I could possibly fit back into the box. It wasn’t until pushing around the top layer of cans that I had realized that there was a more efficient way to space the cans. If you can arrange them so that they are slightly offset and so that the concave of each can nestles between the space of two others – you can fit more cans per layer.

To the plight of Tim and Christopher I unpacked all two-hundred or so cans again and used the new method to fit them back in. Overall, the mistake caused the whole operation to last way longer than it should have and I got all sorts of mean looks from Haley the cat as I aggressively threw the remaining tubes into the cans with a clatter. The lesson I learned may seem trivial at first but if you think about it from a design standpoint that sort of mistake could make or break a project with a tight deadline or a irritate the temper of a fussy client (Haley). If you learn to approach a problem from multiple angles before settling on a solution you may be able to avoid a frustrating (and possibly noisy) mistake.