#35 Tweakers
I’m utterly inspired by inventions. I notice all sorts of inventions all of the time, and its one of the few aspects of our modern world that can calm me down when the thought of how crazy and interconnected we’ve become leaves me feeling appalled. But what excites me even more than the invention itself are the ‘tweaks.’ I don’t know if there is actually a better word to use, but I like to use the word tweak to refer to an invention that improves upon another invention. For example, the Walkman, the first portable music player, was recently tweaked and became an I-pod, a smaller, more convenient portable music player. If you begin to think about it, most major inventions that we use everyday do not have a lot in common with their original model. It’s the tweaks in innovation that have led to our modern world. For example, the automobile has been tweaked so many times that it’s barely recognizable at this point. From the manual transmission to the automatic transmission to cruise control, we’ve seen a wide array of tweaks on the automobile. The worst tweak of all time? It’s gotta be the tweak of “cheese in an aerosol can; also known as “Cheez-Whiz.” That tweak utterly disgusts me.
But aside from cheese in a spray bottle, most inventions, and their tweaks, are awe-inspiring. One invention that a lot of people, myself included, probably overlook the most is the sink. This invention has truly changed mankind, for the better, and forever, and this week, I’m trying to give the sink its due reverence. Think about how often you rely on and use a sink. If your hands are dirty, or even if they simply feel dry or sticky, you wash them in a sink. If you are thirsty, in the middle of the night, and you’re anything like me, you’ll climb out of bed, and drink some water from the nearest sink. And if you cook, you know that the sink provides you with a convenient source of water for all of your cooking and cleaning needs. My favorite tweak on the sink would have to be the adaptive ‘double handle’ feature that enables the user to choose what temperature he wants the water to be. Of course, I’m also a fan of those attachable water filters that make water taste a little less lead-ridden. Other notable sink tweaks include the garbage disposal and the tap that turns the drip into a spray.
One of the all time best inventions that have forever changed my life is bread. Let’s take a moment of silence to celebrate yeast, (even though it apparently can cause infections in women) and try to imagine a world without leavened bread (and I know you can if you’ve ever actually observed the full week after the Jewish Holiday of Passover). But the greatest tweak of all time would have to be evenly sliced bread. Whoever came up with this idea gets my tweak of the century award, for whatever century it happened in.
And when you’re done eating a delicious, messy sandwich made on that amazing pre-sliced bread, you know you’re going to need to wash your hands, but what if there isn’t a sink around, or you are dining with company, and don’t want to excuse yourself? Well than you better use another great invention; the napkin. Whether it’s disposable or reusable, those napkins are real useful. But the best tweak that ever happened to the napkin was the moist towelette. I mean think about it; the moist towelette is perhaps the greatest all time ‘hybrid tweak’ meaning that it combines soap, water, and the napkin, all in one convenient, really small package, that you can take anywhere, and use anytime.
Moist towelettes are most useful when you’re driving in the car, and you don’t want to stop for something as seemingly pointless as washing or cleaning your hands. And as I said in the beginning of this column, the automobile is basically a giant tweak on wheels. Aside from the aforementioned tweaks, the average car now comes with a stereo, a DVD player, automatic windows, keyless locking mechanisms, and automatic lights that detect when they need to go on or off. I even recently saw an advertisement for some expensive car that parallel parks itself if the driver is too rich, I mean unskilled to parallel park a car for themselves. But the neatest car tweak that is going to revolutionize the 21st century is what scientists are calling ‘laser guided cruise control.’ This device, which is already available in certain cars, measures the distance between your car and the one ahead of it, and will automatically break itself if the car ahead suddenly cuts its own speed. This invention, if used by enough cars during rush hour traffic, is supposed to quell traffic congestion by over twenty percent! Anything that quells traffic is great news to me!
Last night, it was very dark in my living room, and as I got up to re-check and make sure that I’d locked the front door (which I suppose could be dubbed another one of my so-called ‘irrational fears’), I came up with the idea for this article when I had no problem finding the light switch in the hallway. And this was due to another great tweak; the self-illuminating light switch. First came Benjamin Franklin and his discovery of electricity, next up Thomas Edison tweaked with that concept and invented the electric light bulb. Yeah, great, “Rah Rah Rah, way to go guys,” but you know that the inventor of the self-illuminating light switch deserves more credit than Franklin and Edison. I truly love those things, and they are so convenient for houseguests who get up in the middle of the night and need to steal some food from their host’s kitchen, but don’t want to wake up their host by fumbling around and looking for a light switch. Not that I would do that…
In this crazy modern world, of which I complain about so many, uh, “moderninities,” I am obviously a giant hypocrite**. Now, I know I’m a giant hypocrite for a lot of reasons, like the fact that I preach tolerance, yet I lose my temper every time that I encounter a bad driver on the road, but the example of hypocrisy that I’m referring to right now is the fact that I claim to hate modern things, yet I’m quite addicted to this ‘internet’ thing we’ve invented. The net is full of more tweaks than even the automobile, but there is only one, so far, that has proven itself invaluable, and this would be the search engine. Pop Quiz; what’s the most expensive stock to purchase right now on the Dow Jones Industrial Average? If you said “General Motors,” than you haven’t looked at a ticker in ten years, if you said “Microsoft” than you haven’t looked at the tape since 2001, but if you said “Google,” then you are really wrong, because Google isn’t included in the DJIA yet, but it will be, just give it a little time, after all, it currently costs a buyer 7.5 times the cost of GM and Microsoft combined to buy one share of Google!
I believe that Google is going to be the Coca Cola of the Internet, and Pepsi has yet to make it’s grand appearance, meaning that Yahoo is the new RC Cola, also known as the ugly red headed step child (side note: Are any of my readers ugly, red headed, and also a step child? if so, I’m sorry, try your best to make lemonade, I think that’s what carrot top did with his bad luck…). But back to Google, Google is impressive because with that company and product, you’re actually witnessing the Internet’s first example of brand name recognition. This means that you can use a product name like Google as a verb to describe searching the Internet for something. Brand name recognition is like the academy awards for Tweaks. The best example that I can think of for these “name-brand tweaks” is Kleenex (which is called facial tissue). At some point or another, I’m sure many of you have asked someone for a Kleenex, when you didn’t care about the producer of the product, you really just needed a soft facial tissue to stick in or around your nose while you blew out your dead, bacteria infested skin cells from your nostrils.
Mmm, dead, bacteria infested skin cells. The only thing I can think of that’s a little more disgusting than that is the cigarette, which is a mighty tweak in itself. Imagine the first cowboy, Indian, or whomever it actually was, that decided to roll up tobacco into a paper cylinder and then light it so that he could occasionally puff from it without constantly needing to re light it? This inventor single handedly took an already horrendously addictive substance and made it just that much easier for the average person to use it!
Recently, the dangers and absurdities of cigarette addiction have led to a unique tweak in the tobacco industry, which would be products designed to deliver nicotine to the user, without the ingestion of smoke. These ‘quitting’ tweaks hold a pretty large market share in most pharmacies, and are making some people very rich. The average package of nicotine gum or patches costs forty dollars, and lasts about a week – that’s actually more money than it costs me to smoke! But give it up to the inventor of these products, because regardless of their costs, and the inventors’ intentions, they are helping thousands of people to quit the awful habit of smoking cigarettes. I’ve used the patch to quit before, and it worked, like any quitting aid works, as long as I actually wanted to stay quit.
With cigarettes slowly phasing themselves out of popularity with the masses, the new bad habit that I see forming is the addiction to the cell phone. Go to a movie, or any other place where people generally don’t use their cell phone during the event, and then watch as the packs of people leave the venue. Instead of immediately lighting up a cigarette, most people now draw their cell phone from their pocket, and begin checking messages, text messaging friends, or calling someone to make plans. I am not tentative in the slightest to declare the cell phone the new addiction for the 21st century. Much like a smoker who forgot their pack of smokes at home, if a modern-day cell phone user leaves their phone at home, they will freak out, ask to share someone else’s all night (“Can I bum your cell, man?”), or demand to be taken back home to retrieve their own cell phone – all typical addict and junkie behavior, if you ask me, or any behavioral scientist!
And I find it funny that with the advent of text messaging, we’ve actually un-tweaked ourselves from the original invention of the Telegraph; let me explain. You see, first came the telegraph, in which you type out short messages that reach someone too far away to normally converse with. Much like text messaging, full of its coded words like LOL, Y R U (instead of “why are you”), and other acronyms, the telegraph used its own unique language for communications, called Morse code. Well, then Alexander Graham Bell tweaked the telegraph and made the telephone, which is a far easier device for communication, since it does not involve the memorization of a new code or language. Then someone else tweaked the telephone and made the portable phone, which was then tweaked into the Cellular phone, so anyone could talk to anyone at anytime, almost anywhere. But now, we’ve tweaked ourselves back in time, and resumed typing to communicate, a la text messaging with a cell phone. What a waste of time, and tweaks!
Even language gets tweaked. The other day I was almost late to work because I got stuck behind a garbage truck that was making frequent stops, but the road was narrow, so I couldn’t pass the truck. As I sat behind the truck, I noticed that it referred to itself as a ‘refuse maintenance vehicle,’ which cracked me up, because I suppose the word refuse sounds better than garbage, but it means the same thing, so why tweak it? I guess some people, when asked what they do for a living, would rather say, “I work in the field of refuse maintenance” than “I drive a dump truck and I pick up garbage.” So be it. But somebody shoot me if I ever refer to myself as a sandwich artist (screw off, Subway!).
Well, It’s getting late, and I’m getting hungry. So if you want to research your own tweaks, and see the best and worst example of modern tweaks, pick up a local in flight magazine, and check out their “Sky-Mall” magazine, or better yet, take a trip to your local Sharper Image store, where you can purchase muffin display racks, and foldable colanders (thanks Jessie!). And what better way for me to feed my appetite then by grabbing some sliced bread, and covering it with cheese. Only I’ll take my cheese in the sliced form, thank you very much! Because if you’re eating a dairy product that is kept under pressure in an aerosol can, then In my not so humble opinion, you’ve delved way too far into the world of tweaks, and you may be a little too tweaked yourself.
