It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

​Every so often you get a brilliant idea. You wake up in the middle of the night and say, "GADZOOKS, THIS IS GENIUS!!" And maybe you grab a note pad by your bed and write down your $billion$ idea and then, when you wake up the next morning, you look at the note and try to figure out what you meant when you wrote, “put it online and phzilkygiiisz.”
 
I know how you feel. My penmanship, which is somewhere between doctor and dachshund, gets even worse in the middle of the night. If I could have read the notes about all my great ideas the next morning, I’d be so rich right now that I’d have someone sitting by the bed all night, just waiting to take dictation. 
 
Until then, I’ll just have to content myself with the recognition that some of those billion-dollar ideas might not have panned out quite as well as hoped. For every idea that hits it big—Pet Rocks, Hula Hoops, carpal tunnel syndrome—another 500 turn out to be expensive flops. I know, because I invested in most of them.
 
There is something much worse than a bad idea that flops, however. Far more expensive and irritating are all the bad ideas that succeed. We are plagued daily by timesavers and solutions that cause much more trouble than they’re worth. They might have seemed like good ideas at the time, but they come from a box labeled Pandora. My own Hall of Shame includes:

• Automatic faucets.  Okay, just move your hand a little closer; no, just a bit more. Oh, did the water just soak your sleeve? Bwaahahahahahah. Automatic faucets seem like such a convenience, but we have no control over the water temperature, how much water comes out or, in some cases, whether the water comes out at all. If only there was some kind of manual override for these things, maybe a handle of some sort that could turn the water on and off and adjust the temperature? Someday, perhaps, such a device could be invented.

 

• Voice mail. Voice mail is the greatest wealth transfer mechanism in the universe, bigger and more far-reaching than Nigerian princes, airline fees, or taking your kids to Disneyworld. Millions of companies save the cost of having people answer phones and take messages; then pay their few remaining employees to leave messages for somebody else. Is anybody actually saving money here?

 

• Rolling luggage. It’s luggage without the lugging. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, the rollers and handles add weight to the bag and take up storage space, and the boarding process is delayed at least ten minutes while people try to figure out how to put their bags in the overhead bins wheels-first. And then we burn up fewer calories than when we carried our luggage, so we’re too fat to fit into our seats on the plane and…

 

• Reply All. Reply all is a shortcut in name only. Send an invitation to ten people and nine will hit reply all to announce whether they intend to show up, ask about the dress code, mention that they’re lactose intolerant and make a snide comment about someone else on the distribution list. After a few cycles of this nonsense, nobody has a clue about the situation being discussed.

 

• Coffee sleeves. Let’s see, we want to save a few trees by making the coffee cups thinner, but now they’re too hot for mortal hands, so we need to kill some trees to make an oven mitt for the coffee cup, and now we have to pay the staff to stock and stack both cups and sleeves. Problem? Solved!!

 

• Social Networking. I’m spending about two hours a day scrolling through Facebook entries and Linkedin entries and checking out tweets. Most of the stuff is boring, so I don’t bother responding. Meanwhile, thanks for calling, but I can’t take an hour off to meet you for lunch today. I’m too busy being social. All alone. At my desk. Surrounded by friends I’ve never met and strangers I used to know.

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• Drive-Through. I don’t have to get out of my car to pick up the dry cleaning, buy my breakfast, drop off a deposit at the bank or mail a letter. I’d be saving tons of time, except that idiot in front of me can’t decide whether to get the hash browns or the tater tots and the guy before him didn’t like the foam on his latte and I had to wait five extra minutes while they re-steamed his non-fat yak milk. Meanwhile, that family of four that was going inside when I pulled up here is done with their breakfast and heading to their car. I can’t understand why they didn’t take advantage of this convenient drive-through lane.

 

• Loyalty Programs. Booking a plane ticket on the company’s dime and earning free trips as a result? Now that’s what they mean when they say ‘something for nothing.’ Except that the flights aren’t available and there’s a fee for cashing in the points and the number of miles needed for a free trip keeps rising. Whether its hotels, airlines, book stores, restaurants, hardware stores or grocers, I’ve been seduced and abandoned by half of corporate America. I’d stop the madness, except I’m only 3,200 points away from a free pencil. Without a doubt, points are the crystal meth of marketing.

 
The list goes on and on, but all this whining is tiring me out. Time for me to go take a nap and dream about some great new ideas to improve our lives. If we’re really lucky, I’ll forget all about them before I wake up.

Of course, the best idea of all is to subscribe to dadwrites.com and learn all the things we'll be mumbling about on the subway in the coming week. Just click here, or maybe here, or even here, and all your problems are solved. 

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