In the vast landscape of urban infrastructure, several elements go unnoticed yet play a pivotal role in maintaining the delicate balance of city life. Among these, indoor manhole covers serve as a critical component, often overlooked but essential for various reasons. These seemingly mundane structures have a significant impact on safety, accessibility, and efficiency within buildings, particularly in commercial settings.
The question of why manhole covers are typically round (in some countries) was made famous by Microsoft when they began asking it as a job-interview question.[8] Originally meant as a psychological assessment of how one approaches a question with more than one correct answer, the problem has produced a number of alternative explanations, from the tautological (Manhole covers are round because manholes are round)[8] to the philosophical.