The world's worst inventions

I woke up this morning at 8:15am as usual. I then grabbed my towel, shampoo, and room key and made the long trek down to the showers. After finishing with that, I came back to my room, and as per my normal routine, put some deodorant on, got dressed, fixed--in the most loose sense of the word--my hair, and was ready to brush my teeth. I picked up my toothbrush, ran some water, let said water heat up, got my toothbrush wet, and picked up my tube of minty flavored toothpaste. Instead of easily moving on with the next step, I was met by a most frustrating problem. The cap on my toothpaste would not budge from its place. No amount of twisting would help. I actually had to run some very hot water over the cap for several minutes until the hardened goo would loosen.

Now, pardon my asking, but who had the brilliant idea to put screw caps onto toothpaste tubes?! As nearly everybody who brushes their teeth with any regularity knows, there is no avoiding the occasional spill over after putting toothpaste on one's toothbrush. In the case of flip-cap tubes, this is not so much a problem. Even if any of the stuff dries and hardens, a flip-cap can easily be reopened. Not so with a screw cap! No sir. With each day of spillage, excess toothpaste gets worked into every single thread in the cap, and by the time you have been oh-so-hygienically brushing your teeth for a month, the cap has a death grip on your toothpaste tube. At 8:30am (or, God forbid, earlier!), the last thing one wants to do is wrestle with an inanimate object. It just isn't a fun thing to do. Therefore, screw-on toothpaste caps qualify, in my book, as the worst invention of all time.

If you noticed, the title of this post is "The world's worst inventions". (Notice the plural form of the noun "invention".) I would not leave you hanging with only one moronic invention, wondering why I had added an "s" to the end of a perfectly good word. So, what is this other "worst" invention? Roll-up projector screens! Who the hell came up with that idea? (I am, of course, speaking of the manual roll-up screens, not the automated one. The person who came up with those is alright in my book.) I can just imagine the roll-up projector screen inventor making his pitch to some office supply company. "So, the basic idea is, you hang a big white piece of paper in front of a wall. Then, you roll it up, around a dowel. How do you get it down? I'm glad you asked. You simply pull it down. And, how do you get it back up? Easy! Just pull it down! Sounds counter intuitive, doesn't it? I promise, it works great!"

In all honesty, I think that the person who came up with that brilliant idea was just looking for a way to completely embarrass young students who were already nervous enough, having to go up to the board and write something. Add in a five minute attempt at rolling up the projector screen, and you have a therapy session waiting to happen.

The excruciatingly sad thing here is that the inventors of both things are raking in tons and tons of dough. I guess, though, that even they are made to suffer through the use of these things.