That's a fun story told often around a most factories. I've also heard it told that instead of a mechanical arm the operator would have to stand up, walk over, remove the box, and go sit back down. Since the guy was a little lazy he just put a fan there. The moral of that story was "ask the laziest guy how to fix your problem and he'll give you a good answer".

It's a dangerous methodology to preach though. In this story they found out that they had a problem where they were producing boxes without product and instead of actually figuring out why they were producing empty boxes in the first place (i.e. determining the root cause of the problem) they over engineered a 100% quality control inspection on every piece at a huge expense.