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A
couple of days ago, I retrieved one (of about a hundred) of our family
doglets' chew bones from the seemingly unreachable chasm under my
youngest and quietest daughter's bed using an ingenious invention
of my own making—namely a straightened-out wire clothes hanger.
This same apparatus also comes in handy for retrieving various undergarments
(along with a metric ton of lint) that somehow fall behind—and
then underneath—our washer and dryer.
The clothes hanger/wonder hook prompted me to consider some other
indispensable inventions that often make me question how I ever survived
without them.
First, I must pay homage to the marvels of the Squatty Potty toilet
stool. The Squatty Potty has absolutely revolutionized my semi-private
bathroom/cell-phone zombification/harassment by pets time. Without
going into details, let's just say that the Squatty Potty "optimizes
the workflow" when I'm taking care of business. In fact, I'd take
the Squatty Potty with me to my workplace if I could do it without
risking public humiliation.
Next, I need to say a few words about the Life360 app. For those of
us who have made the mistake of purchasing our children a cell phone,
the Life360 app eases the pain and guilt by allowing us to stalk them
virtually as they go about their day. We can even monitor their speed
if we've also made the grave error of purchasing them a vehicle.
Gone are the days when parents could be blissfully ignorant about
what their college-age children might be up to in the middle of the
night. With Life360, we can wake up paranoid in the wee hours of the
morning and be comforted to see that they have arrived safely at destinations
like The Tipsy Turtle or The Dixie Chicken—undoubtedly participating
in an all-night prayer meeting.
Speaking of cell phone apps, my wife and I have also come to rely
on the Google Maps app almost any time we leave our home. Neither
of us inherited the sense-of-direction gene, so before Google Maps
came along, we often found ourselves wrestling with a giant paper
map of our own hometown if we had to find our way anywhere other than
church, Walmart, the mall or any Mexican food restaurant in the city.
If we went out of town, we risked impaling our eyeballs with the corners
of a massive Rand McNally Road Atlas we kept crammed in the storage
pocket behind the driver's seat of the car. In emergency cases, we
would stop at a gas station to ask for directions and hope we weren't
speaking to a serial killer or someone selling Amway products.
Nowadays, precise directions to the nearest Taco Bell are only a few
taps away, and we can even choose to have our trip narrated by a woman
with an Irish accent so we feel like we're in Europe!
It's amazing to consider that I lived a great deal of my life without
a cell phone, personal computer or even an assistive toilet stool.
Sometimes, I think that life might not be so bad without all of the
distractions some new inventions provide—except when nature calls
and I reach for my iPhone and the amazing Squatty Potty. |
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