eing Neat Economics

ome time ago Baron Von Lodge was the head of a small country near Switzerland known as Lilliland.

When the Baron was young, Professor Hamblin was one of his tutors and two of the lessons he stressed were to be neat and be on time. It is a known fact that people are insulted if they are kept waiting in just about every facet of life. Those lessons caught on fast but the other lesson, about being neat, was more difficult to follow.

“How does being neat relate to economics?” the Professor was asked. He answered the question with the following story.

It seems that a man worked from his average sized home on different projects that involved cutting and pasting things in a certain order. He used scissors many times during the workday. But when he was finished with the scissors, he would lay them down almost anywhere.

If he forgot where he was where he last used the scissors he would have to retrace his steps and look all over for the scissors. Sometimes they were very hard to find if they were left in a place where papers happened to be piled on top of them. The time he spent looking for the scissors was an economical waste of time.

Then, by being in a rush to complete a job, he became so frustrated that he gave up and went out to the store to buy another pair of scissors. Once he even lost the second pair of scissors and ran to the store to buy a third pair.

Had the busy worker established a specific place for the scissors, he would not have misplaced them.

The money he would have saved by not buying more scissors could have bought something else. He could have purchased a new kitchen carving knife, or a potato peeler, or something else. But instead, he was stuck with three pairs of scissors all the same.

Here is an example of the economics of neatness. Simply put, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

Try not to be a borrower or a lender for the object loaned may become misplaced by the person who borrowed it. If the object is an important tool of your trade, one should not lose a job because the tool cannot be located to complete the job.