I'm Going to be a Millionaire

As I’m looking at my living room coffee table (which was spotlessly clean and uncluttered on Saturday) and now is covered with a tie, an iPod, a baseball cap, hand sanitizer, a Kindle (okay, that’s mine), a glass, a bowl, a sewing kit, and about nine books (never mind the books—literature is always decorative), I’ve decided what I want for Mother’s Day next year. I want furniture with alarms. Not that I care about my furniture being stolen. I want alarms that go off when someone abandons something on a clean and empty surface.

For example, after someone finishes a cup of hot tea and leaves the empty cup on the coffee table, I want an alarm to go off. The message could sound something like this, “Member of the Keller household, please retrieve your abandoned object and put it away.” Of course, it would need a proximity meter, so that the message would get more insistent the further the abandonee got away from the object of abandonment. Stage Two would sound like this, “Get the empty cup and put it away NOW!” Stage Three, “Yo, git the cup and put it in the sink.” Stage Four would be a blaring alarm. “Eeep, Eeep, Eeep! Abandonment alert. Eeep, Eeep, Eeep!”

I could make some serious money off this product. Do you know any mom who wouldn’t lay out some serious cash for a product like this? The product would market itself. I could take it to The Shark Tank and walk away a millionaire. And I think it’s doable.

Jacob could develop the actual product—he knows about circuits, capacitors, etc., and Ariel could program it (it can’t be harder than the smart phone she’s programming for work to detect falls in the elderly). And Luke and Matt would be great field testers. Yep, this is great. I’ll start taking investor signups right away.

Of course, this presupposes that my kids actually want to help me develop this product. And, uh, I think they like things the way they are. Bummer. There goes my million dollars. And now I’m back to my old method of dealing with newly acquired abandonment clutter—I yell “Slave Labor” and my minions come to help.