Business Lessons From A Reddit Thread On Silly Solutions

Reddit thread: What was a really silly solution to a serious problem? : r/AskReddit

Theres a story you get told in engineering school of a company that had a problem of empty boxes without product coming off the line and being shipped to customers. Hundreds of thousands are spent to refine the old equipment but it didn’t solve it. Eventually a monitoring system was designed and implemented to weigh each box as it comes off the line and to flag and shut down the line each time an empty box made it through. This solved the issue as designed. Several months later the owner decides to check on the system and see how many empty boxes are being flagged and finds that in fact none are being flagged, however the problem with empty ones shipping hasn’t reoccurred either. He goes to to the plant floor to investigate and discovers that a low-level employee, tired of having to restart the line every time a box is flagged has simply placed a large fan next to the conveyor prior to the weigh station, this blows the empty boxes off the conveyor while the ones full of product are to heavy to be moved by the fan.

Astronauts used to have a real problem with peeing. The first American to fly in space, Alan Shepard, did so while lying in a puddle of his own urine, because he had to go shortly before launch and didn’t want to go through the process of getting out of the capsule when they’d already been delayed several times. Likewise, the iconic footprint on the Moon was made by a boot full of piss.
Between Shepard’s flight and Apollo 11, attempts had been made to fix the problem. The solution NASA landed on at first was effectively a condom with a tube attached, which would pipe the urine away and store it in the backpack of the spacesuit for later disposal. Except it kept falling off.
Firstly, uniquely to Apollo 11, the landing was just too good. The legs of the Lunar Module were designed to compress on landing to absorb the shock, but Armstrong put the Eagle down so perfectly that the legs didn’t compress at all, meaning that the astronauts had a much bigger jump from the last rung of the ladder to the lunar surface than they were supposed to. A bigger drop meant more force upon impact, and Aldrin’s device fell off.
But that wasn’t the only problem. If it was, then it could be solved by way of “Just don’t be as insanely good at flying this thing as Neil Armstrong,” which wouldn’t be particularly hard, there’s a damn good reason he was the first pick to land the LM. No, Aldrin wasn’t the only man to lose his pee-removal device, and the reason for that was… very silly.
See, the device came in three sizes, appropriately named “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large.” According to Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot on Apollo 11, every single astronaut in the program suspiciously needed a size Large.
NASA rectified this issue by changing the names of the sizes to “Extra Large,” “Immense,” and “Unbelievable,” at which point the men who’d volunteered to ride a giant bomb into the most hostile environment known to man finally felt secure enough in their masculinity to use the correct dick size, and the US space program became much less pee-scented.

Real story: a small colony of beavers in the Czech Republic built dams in protected wetlands that local authorities wanted to dam to protect wildlife.
What took several months of contracting imbroglio and would cost over a million dollars was outdone by beavers in two days.