I Wish I Was an Inventor

Everyone wants to be an inventor of Edison-like proportions, churning out one successful idea after another nearly seamlessly. It would be a sweet self-employed job if you were any good at it. The problem with this is that almost no one is really an inventor. Most people are just hacks. 

Yep. Hacks. 

There I said it. 

Everyone seems to invent the same thing at least 8 times, claim it as their own, go to the patent office, find out someone else has already successfully executed and marketed the idea, go back home and tell people in the company of their friends and family they invented it first or tell people they invented it and act completely unaware it's already out on the market, then go on to fail to invent anything else and return to life as usual.

Everyone knows someone like this. An uncle, a friend, a crazy co-worker. Someone out there you know is a self-proclaimed inventor who "invented" something we already enjoy but takes every opportunity to lament a story of woe about how they were going to or wished they would have because they would now be drowning in money and bitches. (Yes, I'm aware of the clunky, run-on sentence but I don't care so suck it.) 

I'm not making fun of these people. I get it. I really do. It all makes sense. If I was a successful, marketable inventor I would be as smug and pretentious as possible. Who wouldn't want to be that person? The person who invented that thing that everyone uses? I would use my accomplishments as first sentence ice breakers when joining conversations I wasn't invited to. 

I could see it now. A group of people would be standing around mumbling amongst themselves about the new guy at the office or something similarly uninteresting. I would briskly and casually enter their conversation circle. Everyone would turn to look at me and wonder "Who the hell is he? Do we know this guy?" A brief silence would befall this group of strangers, now about to become my newest group of fake suck-up friends for the next hour or so. My hands would be in my pockets as I slowly rock back and forth on my heels a couple of times. My moment is now to break the ice and let everyone know who I am. Not by name though. That would be too formal for an inventor of my caliber. The first line out of my smug mouth would be:

"So I'm relatively certain I'm the guy who invented the perpetual motion machine......"

The circle of strangers would now collapse and gravitate towards my greatness, shaking my hand, asking me how I'm doing, offering me stogeys and priceless family heirlooms to bribe me into a less superficial friendship. I would accept all their gifts but not their acquaintanceships. I would casually remark about how I managed to invent my device and offhandedly mention how my product does nothing more than provide electricity and power for the entire world. No big deal. I'm no hero. Just a guy in a tweed jacket who somehow made a difference for all the little people out there. After I got tired of the phonies, I would look at my $4000 dollar watch that's not even set for the correct timezone and excuse myself citing important meetings. People would try to get my number as I strolled out, but I would condescendingly tell them that a guy as rich as me primarily communicates via telepathy with other rich people. I would also state that I  use phones to exclusively dial late night 1-900 numbers to "fight off cases of the lonelies." With that, I would put on a fedora that I wasn't wearing before, tip my hat to them, remove the fedora, then step on to my private 4 story helicopter and fly away to my sky mansion.

Seriously. Who doesn't want to be that guy?