Don't Let Your Field Operations Turn Into A Rube Goldberg Machine

By Arka Dhar, Zinier

COVID-19 has revealed a lot about the way we live and work.

Some of these lessons (“washing hands actually works!”) are obvious. Others are a bit more surprising, like our ability to become Zoom experts overnight.

And some – like our sudden appetite for Rube Goldberg machines – are completely out of left field.

If that name doesn’t ring a bell, Rube Goldberg was a wildly popular cartoonist from a century ago who is best remembered for his drawings of absurdly complicated machines that made simple, everyday tasks incredibly complex.

If you ever played the game Mousetrap as a kid, you know the quirky appeal and frequent frustration of a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption.

Why the sudden interest?

Hop on any social media platform today and you’ll notice a surprising number of videos featuring Rube Goldberg machines.

There’s something charming and a little bit nerve-wracking about watching these machines in action. On the one hand, you know it’s going to work — the video wouldn’t have almost a million views if it sputtered out after three steps. But still … you can’t help the flicker of doubt that creeps in each time a ball slowly meanders toward its target, or a garden tool just clips the edge of a domino and sets off the next chain of events.