Folks, let's dare to be different

Before Beijing upgraded its buses to accept swipe cards, commuters used to buy flimsy paper tickets. The bus conductor, tucking a hard-frame bag under her arm, would count off the tickets, mark and then peel them from the stack using a peculiar tool - a thick, double-ended pencil (red on one end and blue on the other), wrapped many times around with rubber bands on the ends.

I dare say that every bus conductor in the city - perhaps even the country - used an identical device back then. As a child, I imagined little elves at the Ministry of Transport wrapping rubber bands around millions of pencils to issue to its staff. Later, I started to wonder why, in a country this large, there wasn't the tiniest bit of variety in how people fashioned their makeshift tools. Where's the innovation?

Before the 1980s, conformity was a natural result of sociopolitical factors and resource constraints. Yet, now that we have reached a stage where people can choose to do things differently, we still don't.