Obsessive infrastructure and the Disney trash can lesson

At Disney World, trash cans are never more than 30 steps apart. Walk through Magic Kingdom and you will never see a garbage truck, never see an overflowing bin, never see a custodian struggling with bags. The trash just vanishes every few minutes.

This is not magic. Under the park runs a network of pneumatic tubes that moves garbage at 60 mph to a central facility. Disney spent millions engineering waste removal that guests never notice, never think about, never applaud.

While everyone photographs the castle, I’m thinking about those tubes.

The most effective systems are invisible, boring, and relentless. In healthcare, that means:

• Patient data that moves between systems without a human copying and pasting.
• Eligibility checks that return in seconds instead of days.
• Pricing that gives the same answer everywhere.

No one celebrates infrastructure that works. Your CEO won’t demo the new message queue at the company all-hands. Patients don’t write thank-you notes about sub-second latency.

But everyone notices when it fails. The integration layer goes down and suddenly staff are back to manual entry, except now they’re also fielding complaints about why the new system is “broken”. The eligibility check times out and the front desk tells patients “our systems are having issues” instead of “your insurance isn’t active”. The pricing database drifts and someone has to explain to an angry patient why they were quoted three different numbers.

The work is invisible until it isn’t and to me that’s what makes it worth doing.

The trash tubes at Disney cost more than most of the rides. They generate zero revenue. They don’t appear in any marketing materials. Guests don’t plan vacations around waste management (apart from me I guess?).

But without them, Magic Kingdom smells like garbage by noon and the fantasy collapses.

I keep coming back to this: build the infrastructure that makes everything else feel effortless. Make it invisible, reliable, and dull. That’s not settling for boring work; it’s choosing the kind of boring that lets everyone else do something interesting.