"There was a manufacturing plant that made toothpaste. One year for some reason there ended up being an unusually high number of empty boxes being shipped out. So in order to stop that from happening the head of the company hired a couple engineers to develope a system to catch any empty boxes so they didn’t get shipped with the boxes that actually had the toothpaste tubes in them.

The engineers developed a system that if the box weighed below a certain amount the system would stop and a worker would have to go remove the box and start everything up again. The person in charge loved the idea and implemented it immediately. And right from the get go the number of empty boxes shipped dropped to near zero.

The head of the company wanted to go see the system in action so he goes and visits the plant one day and notices a huge fan right by the assembly line. Very confused as it wasn’t hot he asked the plant manager why the fan was there. The plant manager said the workers were tired of stopping what they were doing to remove an empty box so they just hooked up a fan to blow the empty boxes off the scale before the system recognized it was empty and shut everything off.

So laziness led to a more efficient (and cost effective) plan."

–notgoodwithyourname