A man named George was sitting in his favorite armchair, reading the newspaper, when his wife, Helen, came into the room. She was holding a single, small screw in the palm of her hand.
“Darling,” she said, “this little screw fell out of the kitchen cabinet handle. It’s been loose for weeks. Could you please just pop it back in for me? It should only take a second.”
“Of course, my love,” George said, putting his paper down. “Consider it done.”
An hour later, Helen came back downstairs. She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen, utterly speechless. George was standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by tools. Every single cabinet door was on the floor. The handles were all in a neat pile on the counter. He had a tape measure in one hand and was consulting a complex-looking diagram he had drawn on a piece of paper.
He had a pencil behind his ear and a look of intense concentration on his face. He was muttering to himself, “If I re-calibrate the load-bearing trajectory of each hinge and optimize the ergonomic access angle, I can increase our kitchen efficiency by at least 12 percent.”
Helen blinked, trying to process the scene. “George… what… what happened? I just asked you to put one screw back in.”
George looked up from his work, a proud smile on his face. “Yes, my dear. And in doing so, I discovered a fundamental design flaw in the entire system. Don’t worry, I’m re-engineering the whole kitchen. I’m calling it ‘Operation Cupboard Freedom.’ We’ll have to eat out for a few days, but the long-term benefits will be extraordinary.”