Contingencies Online - September/October 2009

enough for easy use and environmental. We should give the maker, Green Natura, credit—it tried so hard.

I started to feel a little tingle as I thought about this soap. It weighed

50 grams, or a little over 1. 75 ounces for those of you who haven’t made the conversion to metric yet. Even with the hole, it was nearly twice as big as a bar of soap you might get in any other hotel. So I began to wonder, where’s the waste reduction? And I began to imagine what might happen if I stayed at the Old Faithful Inn long enough to work that soap down close to the hole in the middle and found another reason to stay only one night.

With nothing else to think about, being in the sensory-de-prived state that I was in, I began to conjure up solutions for the problems I saw with the design. They all involved the thought that there has got to be something in the middle. What if (and this assumes that the soap actually performed as its inventors imagined) you were lathering up and all of a sudden the soap just disappeared. Zap! You’ve reached the hole, and the soap is gone with no warning.

When you enter the center region with a regular bar of soap, you have a few days of gradual inconvenience and underperformance that warn you off the old and weans you onto a fresh bar. You have time to make the change. There’s continuity. On the other hand, soap with its center missing will collapse upon itself catastrophically. Clearly, the middle serves a purpose, but perhaps it doesn’t have to be soap. I imagined a Cracker Jack-like prize in a little plastic container around which the soap was molded. Or, I thought, maybe a single-use load of soap could be molded around a milk chocolate interior, like in M&M’s.

With these thoughts bashing against the missing middle, the tingle in my head turned into a long hard pull, and the last thing I remember thinking before I met the Zadorian was, “It’s soap!”

“What do you mean, it’s soap?” he said, tilting what appeared to be his head so he would be better able to hear my reply.

“Well, environmentally speaking,” I replied, just then noticing the dark green sky and his bright yellow face. “How could throwing away the unused center of a bar of soap be bad? It’s soap. Isn’t

soap part of the solution—not the problem? By the way, who are you?”

“I am Zad, the chosen Zadorian actuarial receiver.”

“Zad, the chosen....”

“Yes, I am Zad the czar. I have been chosen by my people to assist lost travelers like you rediscover logic and thereby help you onto the path that will take you home.”

“Czar!” I said. “We have a lot of czars where I come from.”

“Yes, I know. But I’m the only czar on Zandoria,” he said with a bit of pride in his voice.

Zad then proceeded to tell me that

people mostly see what they want to see and not what’s actually there. As we get older, we must work harder to see the simple truth. For example, he said, the soap did indeed have a middle. I didn’t see it because it wasn’t where I thought it should be.

He reminded me that children have undistracted reasoning and that I, like a child, should always strive to remove distractions from my thinking so that simple logic will not escape my grasp. I

thought of my 3-year-old grandson, Jay T, who recently underwent childhood development testing. That’s what they do nowadays. When our children were young, we measured their development by ticking off the activities of daily living as they acquired them. Now it’s more cerebral. Children are asked a list of questions that are ordered so that at the point the child loses interest, a developmental marker is established. There was a point in his testing when Jay T was asked to put a chair that was in front of him behind him. He thought about this problem for a moment, I’m told, and then simply turned around.

Suddenly realizing I was back in the bathroom of our room at the Old Faithful Inn, I plugged the sink and turned on the hot water until the basin was full. Then I floated that soap, turning it occasionally, until the hot water softened it. Reveling in the childlike simplicity I was about to reintroduce into the system, I grabbed the soft soap in both hands, held it under the hot water, and squeezed it until it was a new ergonomic shape and the middle was back where it was supposed to be.