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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a Cracked piece about ideas that started as jokes: "The Step-Parent of Invention"  Today's is similar, only instead of jokes, they started as a giant middle finger. Unless you’re an actual deity (in which case, greetings, Ms. Knowles), you’ve almost certainly pulled some petty shit in your day. Actual deities invented petty. Or, well, as they don't exist, we made up stories about them that projected our own penchant for pettiness upon them. Slowed to a crawl in front of a tailgater, helpfully transferred your neighbor’s dog’s poop from your yard to theirs, squeezed all your roommate’s fruit after the third day of seeing their dishes in the sink — nothing life-ruining, just a risk-free outlet for your anger. I'd like to say I've never done anything like that. But I can't. But have you ever been so annoyed, you changed the world? One person cannot change the world. Not even Beyoncé. 4. The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator I've ragged on this before: astrology for psychology nerds. It was also a fairly useless exercise, as the MBTI has been largely dismissed as pseudoscience, probably because it was invented by a stay-at-home mom with zero psychological qualifications to throw shade on her son-in-law. Hence the "petty" part. She took over entire sections of the library as she embarked on a lifelong study of exactly what factors made her son-in-law suck so much, which her daughter finished after her death, which might have stung for poor Mr. Myers if he had any capacity for emotion. Both of my former mothers-in-law had their issues with me, but not enough to ruin the lives of everyone who ever applied for a job. 3. The Automated Telephone Exchange Let's be real: this was going to get invented eventually anyway. Back in the early days of the telephone, you had to call the operator, who would then put your call through to your mom or your side piece or whoever. And then, if they were bored, they'd listen in. You think internet surveillance is invasive? Ha. They knew who was calling who at all times, and they might even decide for you who you were calling, which must have been frustrating for people who asked for their side piece and got their mom. That was a problem Almon Brown Strowger kept running into in 1878. He was an undertaker living in Kansas City, and he just couldn’t figure out why his business was, uh, not as lively as it could be. You want to piss off the undertaker, it's your funeral. It turned out one of the local telephone operators was the wife of another undertaker, and every time someone called for Strowger, she patched them through to her husband instead. As evil plans go, that one's rather amusing. Of course, when the operators were replaced by machines, few of them likely found that amusing. There's also a nice plot twist, but I gotta save something for the article. 2. The Lamborghini This one, I knew about. What can I say? I don't talk about cars much, but I retain some of Teen Me's fascination with them. Not going to quote this one; the article is funnier than I can be. 1. The Dishwasher I've said before (including in that entry I linked above) that while necessity may be the mother of invention, laziness is the milkman. A lot of labor-saving devices came into being not out of pure necessity, but a burning desire to do less work, which of course is a worthy goal that unfortunately only means you end up filling all the time you saved with other busy work, instead of writing poetry or doing philosophy or whatever the labor-saving advocates imagined our current utopia to consist of. Today, it’s a mark of being Kardashian-level spoiled to not even know how to use a dishwasher, but it was invented by a socialite essentially as an insult to the help. But this one, if a joke site can be believed, wasn't even to save the inventor time, but to diss the servants. The socialite in question was Josephine Cochrane, the wife of a wealthy businessman living in Illinois in the mid-1800s. Must run in the family; their distant descendant, Zephram Cochrane, will invent the warp drive, the ultimate time-saving device. In summary, the dishwasher was invented because servants tended to chip the china. Which is ironic, because rare is the dishwasher machine today that doesn't chip whatever is banging around in there. I don't know about you, but if I were a servant, I'd chip the china sometimes just to be petty. |
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