Most of you may find yourselves morosely wondering what you have done to change the world for the better.
I, however, don’t have to fret because I invented something that had a profound and positive impact on our little planet.
Of course no one really “invents” anything; at best, inventors simply rearrange items in our everyday life.
The Polaroid camera, the upright vacuum cleaner, a 747 — all of these breakthrough inventions combined existing technology in a novel way, ensuring their inventors an honored place in history.
My breakthrough occurred in 1971. I was in love with a woman named Elaine. Her family had come to the erroneous and totally unprovable conclusion that I would make her a terrible husband.
Elaine’s evil mother and wicked sisters hatched their insidious plan. They plotted to get me out of town so they could ship Elaine to Hawaii.
I was finishing graduate school and there was no way I could afford to follow the woman I loved halfway across the Pacific.
Elaine’s semi-evil brother-in-law, Jim, (under the power of Elaine’s family) had invested in a small company in Seattle and asked me to fly there and figure out a way to make it more solvent.
He gave me an airline ticket and drove me to the airport. Little did I know what evil plan was in motion.
When I arrived in Seattle, I was spirited off to a small company that made signs for cars and trucks. The signs might say something like “Fred’s Chicken Plucking Service.”
They were printed on plastic, after which a magnetic strip would be glued on allowing you to stick the sign to your truck or van. By day you had a messenger or gardening vehicle. By night it was a private vehicle again, once you peeled off the sign.
The signs were expensive because of the cost of plastic and magnetic tape. Also, a lot of people had small businesses that manufactured these plastic signs and the competition was cutthroat.
I was on a diet so I suggested we make a tiny sign in the shape of a pig. On the pig I wrote: “remember your diet.”
Remember Your Diet
My sign required only a tiny bit of plastic and magnetic tape. The evil guy who was the manager for the Seattle business asked why anyone would put such a sign on his vehicle. In a moment of blinding ingenuity, I explained that the signs would go on fridge doors.
To his credit, the manager recognized my genius. He immediately abandoned large magnetic signs and focused on tiny “diet” signs for fridge doors.
Plans were made to market the product internationally.
I was understandably pleased with myself and flew home to tell Elaine about the way I had saved one of her evil family members’ investments with my invention of the magnetic fridge diet sign.
Alas, Elaine had long since gone to Hawaii. I never saw her again.
I went off my diet. Later, the Seattle company went belly-up when the Chinese flooded the market with cheap magnetic fridge signs. Ha-ha on the Seattle company and its evil stockholders, all co-conspirators with Elaine’s family.
Eventually the entire world copied my diet magnetic fridge signs.
These signs will continue as long as mankind survives. Many millennia after Elaine and her twisted family are dust, people will fondly remember me.
Elaine and her family forever lost out on a magnificent chance to combine their evil DNA with my magnetic DNA. They could have shared in my magnetic-fridge-pig DNA and thus piggybacked onto my fame and glory through the coming millennia.
Too late now.
