The Entrepreneurial Spirit
When I was a kid, I had amazing ideas. Earth-changing ideas! Then my entrepreneurial spirit was crushed not once, but three times.
For the most part, I hated being a kid. I was always eager to be older, although I cannot recall why. Much of it had to do with how I feel most of the time today: that I was wasting valuable time, and that I had to get on with life.
My first idea was to complete all my lifetime’s sleep at once. Basically, I would just sleep 24 hours a day until my early 20s. Then after I awoke (and showered profusely), I would be awake all day and night for the rest of my life, fully able to take advantage of my young adulthood. Of course, I failed to factor in the years of education I needed to be an adult, plus the physical and emotional development I missed out upon. Did I mention I was a kid when I thought of this plan?
As I got older, I started to become aware of the great engineering feat that was my hometown of Dallas. I learned that there were vast networks of utilities that took our waste then returned it to us in the form of clean, treated potable water. And we were going through a ton of effort to clean that water, just to use it to flush our toilets. Why use clean water, I thought, when we could use sea water instead? We wouldn’t need to clean it for drinking purposes — it would just be used to flush toilets. And its salinity might help clean the surfaces as well, just like when you flush your sinuses. My brother was the one who clarified the cost savings for using less fresh water would be offset by the cost of eleventy-billion miles of pipes requiring installation from scratch country-wide.
With my brackish dreams dashed, I turned to problems of physics instead. Pooping during the winter was a tense process, thanks to the frigid toilet seat. I had this inspiration: what if toilets were filled with warm water instead of cold? That way, during that cold dark season, the warm water would heat the toilet and (by relation) its seat. You’d never have to sit on a cold toilet seat again! My dad’s response, “Then your piss would stink!”
Crushed, I tell you!
Photo Credit: Design You Trust
