by Chris McGinty
I spent my Sunday with Miguel, his wife, and his daughter (try and convince me that Oxford commas aren’t necessary) helping them move. Miguel’s daughter is maybe officially and unofficially my goddaughter. The title has stuck. I could probably write a week’s worth of blog posts on the experience, because we had a lot of interesting talks about being on the parent side of witnessing our kids become adults. Mine have been in the adult range for a number of years now (my oldest will be 30 next March and my youngest turned 21 this year. It may seem weird to you then that I claim to be 38 years old, but since I don’t have a college degree, I’m probably not good at math anyway. It is still interesting to look at the experiences of people just starting out in life through the lens of someone who has been adulating for the last three decades.
It’s also interesting to see that somewhere along the line someone solved a problem that people might not have even realized was a problem. Aside from loading up the cars and driving over to the college, this was the first part of the whole experience and I found it pretty interesting. They had a system setup where you had an appointment to check in, you went to the admin office to get your keys and ID, and then drove to a designated spot in front of the dorm. When you got to the designated spot, volunteers helped you unload all of your stuff onto dollies and they rolled all the stuff to the hallway outside your dorm room while you parked.
“03.26.10” by colemama is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
This dolly rocks!
This was brilliant in my opinion. I’m the kind of guy who is always noticing things that are inefficient and trying to solve the problem. I don’t always have a solution, but I’ve come up with plenty. The solutions are usually the kind of thing that when I explain it to people they either say that’s a good idea, or they acknowledge that it’s a good idea while explaining why it won’t work.
This Dolly rocks!
As an example, I was accompanying a friend to court a decade or so ago (he had a check fraud charge that was the result of payday loan places being legal and using postdated checks as collateral at the time) and they had a cattle call at the start of the day so they could dedicate officers to getting people searched for weapons and into the building. That part was efficient, but the bottleneck happened at the elevators. Not that kind of bottleneck, because they didn’t allow weapons or booze. And they wonder why people hate going to court.
I think there may have been six elevators, but it may have been four. It doesn’t really matter. A large crowd of us stood there watching each and every elevator stop at each and every floor on the way up, and maybe even stopping again at a floor or two on the way down. It took forever and there were only so many people who could get into an elevator car. I made the comment that if they dedicated one elevator only going to the fifth and sixth floor and one only going to the third and fourth floor that the crowd would clear out faster because two of the elevators would always skip the second floor and one would always skip floors 2, 3, and 4. I later thought about the maintenance side of it too, because the doors wouldn’t have to open and close five times on almost every trip.
The point is that there are often simple solutions to things if you look for them. Often, a solution I’ve come up with, or a solution that I’ve seen someone else implement, ends up being inexpensive to do. It would seem that people would be looking for these things more often.
My takeaway about the efficiency of volunteers using dollies to help people move in at a designated time is that it’s so simple. It stops problems with twenty cars sitting out on the street while people make fifteen trips to carry stuff in and it solves the problem that once you’ve loaded the car you usually don’t have room for a dolly or many a dollies necessitating a dolly rack.
Sheah! But I’d need a dolly to move the gun rack and a monkey isn’t going to fly out of my butt with said dolly!
It solves many problems with the help of a few volunteers in the most simple way possible. You have help unloading, you have people to answer questions, and the funny thing is that for years people probably didn’t even realize that there was even a problem that needed to be solved.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who still believes the internet can be used to solve problems rather than being a dumping ground for troll shit. I rarely use the blurb as a place for a call to action, but if you write a blog or publish to the interweb in any other way, maybe dedicate a post to a simple solution you’ve witnessed. Speaking of webs, Miguel had to pull over at a rest stop so I could piss on the way to the dorm and I had to walk behind some good old fashioned nature to heed nature’s call. It’s hard to see, but I almost walked into a spider web with a spider that I can only describe as the size of my fist (if my fist was half the size it is) but luckily the moment I felt a little bit of the web I backed up.