The other day I needed to get something from Office Depot. As I was planning my route, choosing which Office Depot location to visit, I suddenly flashed back to a game I used to play when I was a kid – Park and Shop. The object of the game, as I recall, was to drive your car to the parking lot of your choice and then proceed in the most efficient fashion to purchase the things you needed from different stores, returning to your home before anyone else.

I enjoyed that game. I think that it gave me my first taste of something that is part of my core being – efficiency. You had to plan your route so you didn’t waste any steps going from store to store if you wanted to win. Somehow this struck a natural chord with me. Years later, but still while I was a kid, I would read a book about an efficiency expert that would leave me thinking that, yes, this is the way things should be done. I think that book must have been “Cheaper by the Dozen” because I know that the efficiency expert was Frank Gilbreth, though it may have been some other book about him. By coincidence, or perhaps subconsciously, my career choices have placed me in a job that involves evaluating process times.

Back to the game, I realized that it is a reflection of real life today. The game uses “types” of stores you need to visit, like lumber yard, super market, smoke shop (can you imagine a game today that would include a smoke shop!?!), luggage, haberdasher (my first exposure to that word), oil and coal (yes, it’s an old game). Today, you can easily substitute, at least in my neighborhood, “Home Depot,” “Wal-Mart,” “Target,” “Office Depot,” “McDonalds,” etc. With the cost of gas, even with recent price reductions, we are planning our trips more carefully and trying to accomplish more with each trip. I guess the game was good training for my generation.

As a side thought, when was the last time you played a board game? I don’t think I have since my son was little, though perhaps Trivial Pursuits might count, but even then it’s been many years.