There is a small mystery that happens in many homes.
SHORT STORIES
There is a small mystery that happens in many homes.
Someone uses the last piece of toilet paper.
The new roll is right there.
Sometimes they even take it out of the package…
and leave it on top of the holder.
Ten centimeters away from where it belongs.
It is not necessarily laziness.
They finished what they needed to do.
They just left the last ten centimeters of the job for the next person.
And perhaps that small distance says something important.
Finishing a task does not always mean I am done using something.
Sometimes it means leaving things ready for whoever comes next.
In TPS, we talk about not passing problems to the next process.
At home, sometimes it just means changing the roll.
Respect for the next person can be thirty seconds of work nobody will ever notice.