We’ve all experienced boredom at work, it happens, but we don’t always make the best use of that opportunity.

You may know that in a former life I spent quite a bit of time in retail, including a stint as a supervisor at a shoe store in the mall.  At some point our store ran a promotion giving customers a discount on a new pair of shoes if they gave us their old ones.  I’m pretty sure we sent the old ones to some sort of charity, unless they were really gross in which case they went straight in the trash.

The response was kind of shocking.  I think we were giving something like $10 off, but an enormous number of people took us up on the offer.  Of course, that meant finding a place to store all of these shoes as they accumulated throughout the day.

That’s where boredom came in.  Blessed with absolutely nothing to do but listen to a music system we all hated, me and two of the other managers set about creating an old-shoe storage system.  We called it the TUB, or Trade Up Box.

We took a bunch of different sized cardboard boxes we had left over from a recent shipment and created what was essentially a giant mailbox.  It was as tall as me, with a big flap near the top so you could flip it open and toss the newest old pair of shoes down the chute.

It took the three of us — the highest paid employees in the store at the time — about half an hour to construct, which I think was definitely a solid use of company time.  The owner of our franchise visited after we made it and complimented our work.  He even suggested we send photos of the TUB to the other stores in our chain.

I was reminded of this great day last week during lunch at Taco Bell with one of the other former managers.  He was brave enough to try the XXL Chalupa that was the center of my World Series bet with CA.  He seems to have survived the ordeal, so maybe there’s hope for CA and I when we make good on our wager.