Describe a person who solved a problem in a smart way.

The person who comes to mind is my uncle, who runs a small family restaurant near the coast and once fixed a problem that had been costing him money for years.

The trouble was waste. He never knew how many customers would turn up, so he either cooked too much and threw food away at the end of the night, or cooked too little and had to turn people away. He'd tried guessing from experience, but a rainy evening or a football match on television would throw everything off.

What he did was surprisingly low-tech. He hung a paper calendar in the kitchen and, every night for about three months, wrote down three things: the weather, anything going on in town, and how many meals he'd sold. Once he had enough pages, the patterns were hard to miss — drizzle cut his trade by roughly a third, whereas a local festival doubled it. From then on he checked the forecast each morning and adjusted how much he bought at the market.

I think it was smart for a couple of reasons. It cost him nothing, for one. Other owners in the street were paying for software to do something similar. More importantly, he stopped relying on gut feeling and looked at what was actually happening, which is harder than it sounds when you've done a job for twenty years. Within a season his waste had dropped noticeably, and he still keeps that calendar on the wall.