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The Uninvention List Posting Date: Apr 6 2008 7:07PM You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can shame those who rely on his powers. You can make genie use an ugly taboo. You can force the genie underground, to the black market, into the shadowy corners of society. You can make it so that no self-respecting person would be caught dead with a genie.
We did it with the mullet. Once the definition of cool, it was the hair style that propelled Andre Agassi and Billy Ray Cyrus into the sex symbol stratosphere. Now, one glimpse of a Tennessee top hat draws giggles. We have shamed the Kentucky waterfall from the mainstream and forced it into the backwaters where it belongs … with the leaf blower.
The leaf blower is just one example of an invention that needs to be uninvented. Sadly, I have not yet invented the process of uninvention, so for now, we must rely on the more established methods of banishment favoured by the social visionaries who killed hockey hair.
Before we tackle the leaf blower, we can warm up on Bluetooth headsets. These are the wireless marvels that (usually) men wear in their ears so they can talk on their cell phones without actually pulling the phones from their pockets. In airports especially, Bluetooth users wearing tassel loafers pace – always pacing – and talk too loudly so everyone in the departure lounge knows that I HAVE A BLUETOOTH EARPIECE.
The best part, however, is that unlike a normal phone which leaves the side of your face when you’re not speaking into it, the Bluetooth device stays put during telephone silence. Eating a sandwich, it’s there. Removing a stone from a tassel loafer, it’s there. Visiting a urinal, it’s there.
If you entered a public washroom holding a rotary telephone to your head just in case it rings when you don’t want to lift it to your ear, people would laugh. Just because a Bluetooth earpiece is smaller, it doesn’t make the situation different. When you and your earpiece turn toward the wall to pee, we laugh at you behind your back.
If our social pressure eradicates the Bluetooth earpiece, then we’ll move on to the predictive dialer. When you answer your phone on the third ring and no one is there, it’s because a predictive dialer has reached someone else and left you hanging. When you answer the phone and it takes four seconds for someone to ask to speak with “Mr. or Mrs. Mispronounced,” that’s a predictive dialer at work.
The machine dials a large number of people simultaneously, making phones ring all over your area code. The first sucker to pick up gets connected to a live agent. Everyone else got up from the dinner table for nuthin’.
In the old days, a door-to-door salesman put more exertion into making the sale than you did in dismissing him. He walked for miles, lugging a sample case and ringing doorbells. I respect that kind of effort. Now, an invention has made it harder and more time-consuming for you not to speak to someone selling duct cleaning that it is for that seller to call you. That’s not right. We must shame the predictive dialer into Mullet Hell.
Then if that works, we will turn our attention to the Holy Grail – leaf blowers. Never has a more pointless invention been so ubiquitous. A leaf blower, lest we forget, is nothing more than a loud power rake. The last time you raked your leaves, what did you do next? You bagged them, of course. Why? Because left in their nicely raked pile, entropy would soon take over and the leaves would blow back on your lawn. You bagged the sons-of-bitches because you respected the work you put into piling the darn things in the first place.
Leaf blower guys don’t respect the work, so they never bag, so they have to keep repeating the blow. Inventing the leaf blower is like inventing a device that slices bread in the morning and puts the loaf back together again in the afternoon … if that device sounded like small jet airplane.
When I become the world’s greatest uninventor, the leaf blower will be my greatest uninvention. |
