Professor Kompressor was very clever, but he was not
terribly organized. He had a particular knack for losing things. One moment he
would know exactly where whatever it was would be. The next moment... gone.
Things tended to disappear mysteriously whenever he needed them the most.
He was trying to find his glasses.
First he looked everywhere they could possibly be, but were not.
Then he looked everywhere they could not possibly be.
They were not there either.
Trying to figure out what was going on, he took off his glasses and
started polishing them with his handkerchief.
“Where could they...”
Then it struck him.
“I’m such a fool,” he groaned.
“Why is it,” he reflected as soon as he had calmed
down, “that it’s so difficult to keep track of these infernal things? Even when
they’re right in front of my nose.”
He was, of course, not the first person to have
this problem. Glasses go missing all the time, all over the world, causing
immense frustration for their owners.
Professor Kompressor decided to do something about
the problem. The situation was calling for an invention, but it was not clear
what this invention should be.
His first suggestion solved the problem, but was
not very practical.
“I could just stop wearing glasses,” he
considered. “Then I wouldn’t lose them.”
“On the other hand,” he added thoughtfully, “I
wouldn’t see very clearly.”
“Could be dangerous, as I might crash into things.”
“Better think of something else.”
The second idea was more promising.
“How about making the glasses more noticeable?”
“I know! I’ll install bright flashing lights on
the frames, turned on and off by a remote control.”
“Whenever I mislay the glasses, I just turn on the
flashing lights and they should be easy to find.”
“Might look a bit silly, but that doesn’t matter.”
The Professor could not afford to be vain.
He went straight to the inventing studio to work
on the idea of the flashy glasses.
Emerging a couple of hours later, very pleased
with himself, he decided to test the new invention by mislaying the glasses. On
purpose.
This turned out to be quite difficult, but
eventually he managed to forget where he had put them.
“Alright, then...” he muttered to himself, “time
to see if this works.”
“Only need to push the red button on the...”
“... remote control!” he gasped as he realized
that he could not find it.
He looked absolutely everywhere.
As he was rummaging through a pile of letters and
mixed paperwork on a shelf in the hallway, he considered that it might have
been a good idea to put flashing lights on the remote control as well.
“Of course,” he figured, “then I would need
another remote control and I bet I’d manage to lose that, too.”
Eventually, he found the offending item. In his
left trouser pocket.
He pushed the button and, to his great relief, saw
the red lights on the glasses flash from the bookshelf.
“Seems to work,” he concluded.
In the evening he sat down to watch television. It
was a program about wildlife in the Arctic, or somewhere cold like that. The
snow on the screen made the Professor feel chilly. He decided that a mug of
tea, three lumps of sugar and a splash of milk, would be just the thing to keep
him warm.
Returning from the kitchen, he sat down in his
comfortable chair.
Unfortunately...
... he managed to sit on the remote control.
The glasses started flashing.
On – off – on – off...
Stunned by surprise, the Professor had no clue
that was going on. He was simply sitting there, flashing like a
Professor-shaped emergency vehicle.
The only thing missing was a siren.
This mishap made him decide that the invention was
not quite what he was looking for.
He went back to the drawing board.
The next day he solved the problem, once and for
all.
He simply tied a string to the glasses. That way,
when he was not wearing them, they dangled on his chest.
Tried and tested solutions are often the best.
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