Aside from some truly enjoyable visits with friends, this week has been a quite the downer. I’ll eventually get around to writing about the events of the the last few days and the coming ones, but I’d rather end today on a higher note.
I’m the queen of thinking of creative solutions for predicaments, but then saying “someone should invent a device that does…” without realizing that I’m the one who just then might have invented something quite useful . Many ideas I’m sure would have been complete duds, but had I invested a bit of time on research and development I imagine that it’s entirely possible that I’d have a patent or two under my belt.
When I was in the corporate world, for years I worked with a woman who then and in the years since, has been a close and trusted friend.
D. and I have never been at a loss for topics to discuss, and can’t imagine a subject that we’ve not chatted about at least once over the years. Many times she’d hear my ideas for a new product (often times we’d quickly agree that it was one for the trashcan) but occasionally she’d tell me that I really ought to act on the notion.
One idea particularly sticks in my head. I detest feeling cold. I’m not that thrilled about feeling overly hot either, the Canadian spring and fall seasons are by far my favourites. I prefer temperate rainy, foggy days and my photography archives certainly reflect that.
Wouldn’t it be a great idea to invent a vest that’s battery operated for warmth, just like an electric blanket? D. jumped all over that idea, and every time I mentioned it she urged me to pursue the concept further.
Jump ahead fifteen years, and I’m going through one of my experimental ECD treatments. And I’m cold. Not just chilled, but iced down to the bone. Walking around the house wearing a blanket tightly wound around me even though it’s on the cusp of officially being summer, kind of cold.
I was already in pretty dire financial straits by this time, about to be without a home and absolutely no income other than the proceeds of a garage sale (a whopping $263) to get me and Suz through who knew how many months ahead.
Time to kick that electric vest idea into gear!
That high lasted all of the two minutes I needed to search the internet to see if someone else had the same idea.
They had, about three years earlier. Had I acted on my creation way back when, I might have had a good ten years or more of raking in the big bucks.
Of course chances are that would never have come about, but it gives me pause sometimes to think about the ideas that got away from me.
Now I’m going to pass the baton over. Something needs inventing, and it needs inventing badly. Somebody please invent it, and make a gazillion dollars in the process. Put a little aside for charities, I have some names of wonderful organizations to offer up.
Wireless oxygen delivery. I know, I know, a crazy idea. But perhaps one day people like me might be able to free themselves of the long tether and put away those heavy portable tanks.
One of my visitors this week is a brilliant man whom I’ve known since he was a brilliant boy, before we started kindergarten. He agreed that technology needs to catch up in order to adequately power a tiny oxygen concentrator, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
So go forth. Make the big bucks and help millions of patients who like me are tired of feeling like an animal on a lead. And make sure my friend D. gets a commission out of it, will you?
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