Thought of the Day 06.10.10

When I used to work at Blockbuster Video, there was one job which I particularly hated: cleaning all the movies and shelves every week. For a fidgety, easily bored guy like me, such monotony was grinding, a pain made all the more awful by a firm belief that we could have done it once a month and no one would have noticed the difference. Thus, boring and pointless reinforced each other for great misery in me.

However, I recently realized a hidden benefit of cleaning all those movies over and over: seeing them so many times caused me to know them. This meant that whenever someone asked me about a movie, I would already know whether we had it and where it was. And I can’t imagine an equally effective way to have produced that knowledge other than as the indirect effect of all that ridiculous cleaning. Studying a list of titles, for example, would have been pointless by comparison.

So, do I believe this weird bit of highly effective training was by design? No. Does that mean it was therefore less effective? Not in the least. Sometimes unintended consequences can be benefits.