Boots on the ground are better than oafs in an office

Somewhere in America, there is a college with lawns so green and perfect that no student would think of setting foot off the sidewalk to crush so much as a single blade of grass. There are no signs scolding students to “Keep off the grass”—not that signs ever make much difference to college students anyway. The students take no short-cuts across the lawns that are perfect without guardians of any sort.

The students stay off the lawns for one simple reason:

And that is because, when the architects and engineers built the campus many years before, the first year of classes opened with brand spanking new buildings whose doors and stairways led straight out onto the lawn. There wasn’t a sidewalk in sight. Students were forced to walk on the grass, no matter how they felt about it.

A month later, after thousands of students had tromped on their twice-thousands of feet to trample their quickest and most direct way from building to building, the architects and engineers returned to the campus lawns to see where the pathways led.

And that is where they put their sidewalks. Today’s students take no short-cuts across the grass, because the sidewalks are the shortest cuts of all.

I can’t remember where I heard this story. It may be apocryphal. There may be no such college campus in America, or anywhere in the world.

But I like the story anyway, because it makes so much sense. Sidewalks are no more effective at telling your feet where to tread than gloves are at telling your hand how many fingers it should have.

Because the proper relationship between sidewalks and feet is for sidewalks to follow where feet want to go.

I thought of this recently when I stayed overnight in a motel in Fort Frances, Canada. In the morning, I went down to the breakfast room to make waffles in those great waffle irons they have at motels like this.

But the waffle iron this time was a bit different from the ones I usually see when my wife and I stay at Drury Inns. I read the instructions sheet posted on the wall above the iron, poured in the batter, turned the handle, and waited for the bell to ring when it was done.

When the bell rang I returned to the waffle iron and opened it to find a sticky mess. A young lady who worked in the breakfast room showed up and said, “Oh, yeah, you have to spray it with cooking oil before you put in the batter.” She started scraping the mess out of the waffle grid with a tool they kept there just for that purpose.

I flushed with embarrassment, feeling like an idiot. It’s people like me that cause instruction manuals to be written the size of novels for every gadget you’ll ever buy: “If your electric appliance fails to work, check to see that you have first plugged it in to an electric outlet…Do not test the heat of your toaster with your tongue…Curling irons are for external use only.”

But nowhere on that waffle iron’s instruction sheet did it say anything about cooking oil.

“You know,” I said to the young lady, “my wife and I have stayed at Drury Inns many times where they have waffle irons just like this, and we’ve never had to use oil spray to get the thing to work.”

It was the kind of thing you say to restore your dignity and establish the fact that you didn’t just get off the boat from some third-world country where waffles are made over fires of smoldering animal dung.

“Yeah, I know,” the girl said. “But our waffle irons don’t have a no-stick coating, like they do at Drury. You’re not the first to do that. I have to clean out this thing several times every day.”

“Well, do you have a pen? Why don’t we just jot in a little note on the instructions to tell people to spray it first?”

The girl was horrified. “Oh, no,” she said. “The company won’t let us change their signs in any way.”

“Really?” I said. “The corporate suits on the 30th floor of some office building in Montreal or Winnipeg would rather pay you every day for your needless cleanup time, instead of letting you jot a note to fix the problem? Or even—god forbid—for them to take the time to print up a more accurate sign?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said with a shrug. “My manager has told them time and again. But they won’t let us change the sign.”

Who knows—maybe it’s cheaper to pay minimum wage for a girl to clean up four or five times a day, rather than spring for the cost to print up signs and send them out to a nation full of corporate waffle irons.

Or maybe that hotel chain simply had a CEO with no respect for the opinions of the boots on the ground. How could a simple working girl—or her manager, for that matter—know more about what’s best for business than a high-ranking executive on the 30th floor? Besides, reprinting a sign might seem like an admission of error. Best to leave it alone.

I finally got the waffle I hungered for, though it took me a lot longer than I hoped it might, and my ears flushed red the whole time I waited for that poor girl to clean up my mess.

And when I checked out and carried my luggage to the car, I took a short cut across the lawn on my way to the parking lot—right past the big sign that said, “Keep off the grass.”

---