Here’s a fun little story that’s stuck with me for years because it demonstrates this in a very hacker way. (Forgive the lack of specificities, I tell this as

Here’s a fun little story that’s stuck with me for years because it demonstrates this in a very hacker way. (Forgive the lack of specificities, I tell this as a parable) A fancy new office tower was opening downtown. Around this time, office space was at a premium so they soon sold out all their floorspace, and the project was considered quite successful except for one small problem; the architect seems to have installed slow elevators. Tenants began to complain that the ride up to their high, and very expensive, offices was taking too long. These elevators were stupidly slow. The building management frantically called around the big elevator companies, getting motors upgraded as fast as possible, but the complaints kept coming and in the end no one could quote anything less than $100mil to structurally alter the building to house bigger motors and more shafts. Then one day an independent construction contractor showed up who offered to do a retrofit to fix the issue for only $10mil. The desperate building management decided to try it. So the guy took $500k of the money to buy and install a bunch of mirrors in the elevator booths which had been sombre (and expensively) wood-panelled. Sure enough, the complaints stopped coming. (And the contractor got a $9.5mil payday) The problem wasn’t that the elevators were slow. It’s that people got bored in them (in a world before smartphones). And what do people never get bored of doing? Looking at themselves in the mirror. Of course, it’s annoying to save the equivalent of 95% of the cost but not see any of that money. You just had to deal with budget cuts that really should have killed any solution. Still a cool party trick I guess.