Thursday January 18th, 2007
Ouch, watching Big Brother is too painful. Not just the sniping backstabbing, but I’m watching the division of a shopping list. £45 for nine people, and instead of getting economies of scale by bulk buying bigger packs, they are now trying to divide it into £5 each. I find such ignorance painful to watch.
It takes me back to one of the greatest lessons I was ever taught, by a combined class of Mr. Hallis’s and Mr. Hutton’s in A level economics. We were set a task as a class that to survive we had to provide “shelter, food and clothing”. Each item was represented by a piece of paper that needed to be made to set specifications.
There were a limited number of scissors, paper and staples. First time round everyone tried to make their own three requirements in the set time, fighting for the scissors and the paper and the rest - yet it was impossible. No one did it. Second time around, the failure was almost the same. After three failures the teachers told us we were the worst class they’d ever seen.
What no one had realised (or actually many of us, i suspect thought it, but no one showed the leadership) was there was only one way to do it. We were then told and set up a production chain with some making each piece of work, others collating, others delivering paper and it worked first time.
The lesson for the Celeb Big Brother contestants is that with the limited resources, bulk buying the large food items (e.g large rice bags) and then only personalising it at the boundaries.
