Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I’ve decided that not enough people spend time inventing useful and important things. Wind-up radios and apps that turn your mobile phone into a spirit level and vehicles for driving on Mars are all very well, but there are so many more vital needs here and now. So here’s my list.
Self-righting shoes
Why is it that all shoes, when taken off after a hard day’s work and tossed into a corner, always land upside down or on their side? It’s the bane of my life.
Those soles just sit there shamelessly untidy and openly defiant, glaring at me and daring me to turn them over. I’m no fool. I collect statistics. I can confirm that shoes only settle the right way up 12.6% of the time, despite the soles usually being the flattest and heaviest part. Are they trying to tell me something? Do I want to listen?
Self-levelling restaurant tables
How many millennia have we been going to restaurant tables and bars? And how many times do we carefully place our full glasses or soup bowls down, and then someone jogs the table and it all gets spilt? You’d have thought that someone might have found a simple solution to this problem by now.
I once knew someone who carried a door wedge at all times, and used it everywhere he went. Sadly, this was their only conversational subject, and he only frequented bars, so I left him to it.
One could also tackle this problem from the angle of self-righting floors, but that’s harder to do, and it relies on the assumption that the tables aren’t rickety anyway. Three-legged tables obviously won’t wobble, but they can’t be relied on to be level, so you often need to stick folded beer mats under their feet, just to avoid having all your drinks landing in the lap of the most downhill person.
Stacking hangers
Clothes hangers are remarkably fit for purpose if you’re hanging clothes on them and if you have a rail, but am I the only one who has trouble with any number of hangers greater than two that aren’t actually hanging on anything? They make themselves into a nest, cleverly intertwining themselves so tightly that you can’t get hold of one to extract it from the pile without lifting the whole lot, which leads in my case to extensive struggling and swearing.
I tried making a wooden rack for my hangers once, but they’re not standard shapes and sizes, and the hangers defeated me again. I’d like someone to design hangers that stack together so they can be carried and lifted off one by one in a calm and peaceful fashion. Come on! Ironing’s already fraught enough!
User-friendly price stickers
I know that shops often need to put prices on things, and a price sticker is an obvious way to do this. The price sticker helps the person at the desk to ring up the correct price, and it also makes it less successful for shoppers to pretend that they bought the item somewhere else. I understand this. But how many of us have struggled to scrape off the pesky things without damaging costly Christmas gifts? Or, even worse, looked at a pile of freshly-wrapped presents and realised that we forgot to take the price stickers off?
This isn’t a universal problem. Supermarkets haven’t used price stickers for years, apart from their ever-popular special offers and last-minute reductions. They rely on the bar code and the vigilance of their staff. Besides you’ve got to take everything through check-out.
I know all small shops can’t invest in super security, but it’s not very considerate to sell me a book or CD or other item as a gift which ends up all ripped or still smeared with black glue after hours of effort just to take off the evidence of how much I actually spent on it. Besides, it’s not so easy to sell it on as new in mid-January on eBay if it’s damaged this way. There must be a better solution than price stickers.
Milk bottles that pour properly
I don’t have a problem with plastic or cardboard packaging for milk or any other liquid. I know that glass is heavy and breaks easily and isn’t economical to recycle constantly. I imagine that the packaging we currently use is eco-friendly, otherwise they wouldn’t use it. But I don’t understand why it’s so hard to design something that pours properly. Every time I get the milk container out of the fridge, unscrew the top and tip it up to pour some into a cup of tea or bowl of cereal, at least some of it dribbles down the side and leaves a puddle on the worktop.
This is annoying, wasteful, and uses up a lot of unnecessary kitchen towels and cleaning materials. It’s not just drinks, either. This time of year I’m constantly buying screenwash for my car, and every bottle I buy has a large neck which I have to aim at a small container somewhere in the depths of the cavity under my bonnet. It requires a stout heart and steady hands to direct the flow in a constant stream that doesn’t pour all over everything, and much of it simply misses the target.
Parcel delivery made easy
How many of us have to go to the Post Office sorting place down some dark alley because the postman hasn’t been able to deliver that package we’re so eagerly expecting from Amazon?
We find that red card, which perversely changes to blue at Christmas, inviting us to attend during office hours or very early on Saturday morning to pick it up. Or, even worse, there’s a card from some courier company telling us to fetch the parcel from the back end of some industrial estate near Cowes before it’s shipped back to the mainland.
Nowadays we, the consuming public, do so much of our shopping online, but there’s a crucial gap in the supply chain. There should be a box or bin into which the deliverer can insert our precious parcels, which is sightly (rather than the opposite), and secure. They’ve been managing this with post boxes for a long time, and banks have secure one-way package delivery facilities, so I’d like someone to invent one of these for me.
Proof of Posting
I know that making it really secure would be a challenge. Presumably anyone could put anything in there, which is a concept I’d rather not go into. It could be equipped with some sort of camera device or something. I don’t know what; I’m an ideas man, not an inventor!
I do know from bitter personal experience that even a letter box wouldn’t stop that sort of thing. I once lived on a popular route from pubs to home late at night via a kebab van. For some reason my letterbox was the place most often chosen to post the remains of their kebabs. I presume these good citizens were avoiding littering the streets.
I think this is most important, because I want every present destined for me to have a fast and efficient delivery system, just in case some of them are delayed … apart from Santa’s delivery, of course, which is always immaculate. And I hope, however they arrive, that all your Christmas presents are delivered safely into your hands.
Preferably without price sticker debris.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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