Thoughts from inside the box

While you can’t hardly go to a business meeting without hearing some guy in a suit talking about the need to “think outside the box,” I’d hazard to guess that there’s some overlooked merit in thinking “in the box.”

To test this hypothesis out, I put a box on my head and started doing a little cogitating.

Of course, the box is not the first dark place I’ve been accused of having my head. Let me assure you I’ve never actually had my head in “that” region because A:) I eat too many chicken wings to be that flexible, and B:) even if I used as much hair gel as my brethren in TV media, my head still wouldn’t fit.

From my scientific experiments, I have found the benefits of thinking inside the box are many. For example, when it rains, I can’t think of a better place to think than inside the box. While my out-of-the-box brethren are getting soaked, my head is kept warm and dry in the square brown safety of my 9-1/2-inch by 13-inch box.

When riding motorcycles, an inside-the-box thinker has the added protection of 1/8 of an inch of cardboard as opposed to out-of-the-box thinkers, who have only mere helmets to rely upon.

In-the-box thinking also leads to great acts of humanitarianism. For example, when a co-worker is moving and asks for help, an in-the-box thinker is able to immediately furnish something that co-worker needs, while out-of-the-box thinkers are left to make half-hearted promises to come over and engage in heavy lifting.

Keeping one’s thinking inside the box also prevents possible bad ideas from getting out and infecting others.  For example, the current credit crisis caused by financial institutions lending money to poor credit risks could have been entirely averted if the borrowers had just shown up to the bank wearing boxes on their heads. Show up to any bank with a cardboard box on your head and I guarantee you they won’t lend you any money. In fact, the wizards of finance are so frightened by the salt-of-the-earth frugality and good sense of in-the-box thinkers that they’ve been known to summon police whenever someone shows up at the bank wearing a cardboard box over their head.

Ever wonder why Wal-Mart is so successful? Three words: Big box store. Each square-shaped site is an organic supercomputer. That’s why you can’t get any help there. It’s not that the employees are lazy, they’re just using their brain power to design roller coasters and calculate the perfect Rollback price.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to inside-the-box thinking, such as a propensity to stumble and trip over objects. This is easily remedied however, by cutting eye holes into the box.

I also cut a mouth into my box to cut down on the echo when I talk. The eye and mouth holes give the box a jack-o-lanternish appearance, so when Halloween comes around I intend to paint the box a festive orange.

On a less literal level, in-the-box thinkers are the folks who pay the bills on time, check the oil, set the alarm clocks, read the directions, and put the ideas of the out-of-the-boxers to practical use. Conventional, by-the-book thinkers help make the world orderly enough for out-of-the-box types to have the time and freedom necessary to dream up their wild schemes and pipe dreams that often fail but sometimes change the world.

And at the very least, inside-the-box thinking has improved the Dothan Eagle by replacing the usual unpleasant picture above this column with a much more aesthetically appealing image.

Jim Cook can be reached at or wherever an idiot wearing a cardboard box can be spotted.