The Great Styrofoam Disaster

We have an unfinished basement where the kids LOVE to play, especially when friends come over. It's a safe place where they will sometimes play for hours.

In addition to toys, like many basements we also have an assortment of cardboard boxes. And being the frugal people we are, we also have a few very large boxes full to the top of styrofoam packing peanuts for use in shipping things.

Kids + packing peanuts + "let's play snowstorm" = ultimate basement disaster.

It actually wouldn't have been so bad if we would have cleaned it up right away, but we were both so appalled with the whole thing that we shut the door and ignored it for weeks. The kids continued to play completely unphased, smashing the thousands of large styrofoam peanuts into millions of little styrofoam pieces.

We finally faced the music yesterday and armed with brooms and vacuums were able to clean it up.... in 8 times the amount of time it would have taken us to clean it up right away.

Moral of the story: don't ignore small problems, they only get bigger. It's another spin on the classic "car-maintenance" analogy (another thing I am awful at). Think how this applies to relationships with coworkers, angry customers, business plan flaws, etc.

What are you ignoring right now that's only getting worse?