View from the North 40: Genius for a day - 1 day

You ever have those days when it becomes obvious that you might have a knack for being a genius? I don’t. Well, I didn’t until one glorious day this week.

It all started when I bought a bag of cheese curds at the grocery store as a snack to hold me over for the drive home to supper because, hey, who doesn’t love cheese curds and, of course, 10 minutes is a long drive when you’re really hungry.

In my weakened state, the sturdy packaging thwarted all my attempts to gnaw through the plastic. I cursed the fools who made the packaging so inconvenient and snatched a pocket knife off my husband. I got the bag sliced up but risked serious injury with a sharp object. “This is not right,” I thought. “They should make an easy-open tear-able top with a resealable strip.”

Later, with a mouthful of cheese soothing my brain, I saw that the bag had the very features I thought it should. The problem — and this is why I don’t feel bad about calling the manufacturers fools — was that they put the tear-opener and re-sealabler on the bottom of the bag.

What were they thinking? You rip open the bottom of the bag and everything spills out onto the floor. Who needs the re-sealing strip after that? It’s crazy. What do you expect from the company that also put their packaging label on upside down, too.

My idea to move the opening to the top (and flip the label, as well) would surely skyrocket that company’s bottom line. They could be Fortune 500 by the end of the year with a genius like me at the helm.

There will be cheese curds for every hungry soul.

Not content to conquer only the world of cheese curds, I later devised a plan to revolutionize the hot dog industry, too: hot dog buns that are sliced along the top rather than the side.

Think about it.

You slip a dog into a standard bun slathered with condiments then close the top half down and what happens? That’s right, everything oozes out the side where the opening is.

So messy. So wasteful. So stupid.

I can fix that.

You slice that bun down the center of the top and what do you get? A loving bed of bread for your hot dog, condiments and all.

You can’t argue with that logic, nay, that genius.

I went to bed invigorated by my profound new gift for problem solving.

Sadly, though, by the next morning I had lost even the mental acquity to figure out how to get the toilet paper to spin off the roll before my sinuses dripped.

Late for work, buttoning the wrinkled lapel of my only clean shirt, I excitedly thought: “If only I could design a heated clothes iron-like tool that I could use to flatten the fabric without having to take the shirt off.”

And, Shazam! I had it.

Imagine my disappointment, though, when I realized someone had already invented it.

Sure, they stupidly called it a curling iron, but I couldn’t beat that design perfection. I just clenched the pre-heated jaws of my “curling” iron onto the lapel and slid the iron up and down the front of my shirt. Voilà!

I had invented nothing.

Good thing I looked well-pressed and tidy for work because my brain obviously isn’t genius enough to quit my day job. Yet.

(I'm designing a device to make toilet paper rolls spin only one direction — under side only — at [email protected].)