Thinking Outside Of The Inventory Box

When my brother and I were teenagers, we were hired by my dad’s office for two weeks.

They were going to move locations soon, so they hired a bunch of students during the summer to put files in boxes to prepare for the move, basically.

My brother and I were working in the same department, which wasn’t the one our dad worked in.

Our supervisor told us how to proceed. Apparently, they had hired two students — specifically one girl and one boy — for each department. The boy was supposed to put the files in the boxes and lift the boxes and the girl was supposed to take inventory for the content of each box. In her words, the boxes were too heavy for teenage girls and teenage boys were too sloppy to take inventory correctly.

My brother and I looked at each other in silent judgment and we thought that that was going to be very inconvenient. She basically wanted my brother to put files in a box, close the box, move the box to me, then for me to open the box again to go through the files to add them to the inventory, and then to call my brother again so he could move the box.

We decided quickly to disregard that and asked my dad if he could get us a second computer. We got one and we both took care of everything — adding the files to the inventory, then putting them in the boxes, and then moving them.

Surprise, surprise, I was more than capable of moving boxes — that weren’t even that heavy — and my brother was more than capable of taking a simple inventory.

In the end, we finished way earlier than students in other departments and our supervisor was very satisfied with our work.