How Ideas Die

A few years back, I was in the laundry room of my apartemnt building and cleaning out a lint trap. The lint had three sedimentary layers, each with a totally different lint palette, so obivously hadn't beeen cleaned out in a while. This wasn't uncommon. Neither were broken dryers.

It occurred to me that a dryer repairman, should there be any such specialty, would likely know of this weakness in communal clothes washers, and have been, in his/her career, on so many repair calls obviously caused by the inability of people to clean lint traps with any kind of reliability that it had become habit to clean any lint trap encountered, whether the machine he/she had been called on or not, just to save him/herself, and all others of his/her ilk, some tiny bit of that monotony.

And I imagined lots of jobs might encourag this type of thing. And I always thought that was kind of interesting, and that I might use it some day.

Until...

A new toilet was being installed in the house I rent. My landlord, a Seattle actress with capital S and A, sat within three feet of the plumber throughout the process, watching and occasionally attempting to sound interesting or interested.

"So, tell me, what is the one thing people do that you wish they didn't, or the one thing they don't that you wish they did?"

It sounded like she had read it from a card in the "Connect With People and Get More Out of Life" boardgame. Golly, aren't I well-rounded because I care about how a plumber thinks, and maybe I can even use any insight I get out of this to better myself.

And, fuck me if it didn't sound a little familiar.

The plumber answered, after a long pause, with a "Huh?" that made me love him, just a little.

I have abandoned the lint trap idea.