Bamboozle

Bloganuary writing prompt

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

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We all have peeves, things we despair of or are just plain inured with. Ask someone to name something they’d love to see un-invented and watch them vent. The steam will curl out of the ears, the invective will roll, and the prose turn bright purple.
I, too, have my itches. Certain rude people come to mind, but while I think of them as worth reinvention, we are talking about things, not folk.

So, being that I am a carver, the power router comes to mind. If you are a woodworker, you receive enough catalogs, flyers, and promotions monthly to account for some significant deforestation. And more than half the space in those gets dedicated to routers, router bits, add-ons, router tables, and many other things router-oriented. After reading through the stuff, you have to understand that if your shop is not full of these add-ons, you can’t be a woodworker.
But while you will probably find one or two routers in most carving shops, boatyards, and such, we, by and large, have almost none of the do-dads. The router is just another tool for particular purposes – different from the solve-all-needs the catalogs and flyers suggest.

What does the router do? It does an outstanding job of cutting grooves and profiles for moldings. Attached to computer control mechanisms, you can even do a crude carving. It has many legitimate uses. But many shops work efficiently most of the year without pulling a router out of storage, setting it up, using it, and storing it again. In my shop, by the time I do all the setup, I can more efficiently carve the letters, create the profile with a plane, or remove the background on a carving with hand tools.

So, the pages of glossy ads annoy me. But I am merely a weak-minded woodworker. I have given in to the advertising candy and purchased some goodies. I have an expensive router table covered with other stuff somewhere in the shop. After assembly, I did an evaluation of its use in my business. I found that the one thing I truly needed it for, it couldn’t do.
It may not be the router that needs un-invention. It’s the idiots in their offices inventing all the plastic and metal do-dads, writing the ad copy, and publishing the catalogs full of trash meant to bamboozle us.

It is people, after all.