Are inventions gifts from God?

By Jake J. Nho

I will be the first to admit that some inventions are too good to be true. Electricity, automobiles, pizza. Who could live without them? But then, there are those we could certainly do without.

I was waiting for the signal at a pedestrian crossing the other day and noticed ― as I usually do ― that there was a timer that tells you how long you have to get to the other side.

This is something relatively new and I have been told that this was invented by a man whose young daughter was killed while trying to get across the street at a crossing.

Initially, the timers were confined to selected locations in Seoul and elsewhere in the country but it is now commonplace on virtually every street. How could we have lived without them?

With the timers, pedestrian can take casual walks or speed up their pace to make sure that they complete their short but sometimes dangerous journey knowing the exact timeframe that they are working on.

This seems to be rational enough and you would think it would have been around for much longer but sadly, it took the life of a little child to make it a reality.

There is another cute little invention ― courtesy of one Korean man who apparently had lots of time on his hands ― that many people do not notice.

When you go to a supermarket or a grocery store and try to pick out a can of fruit juice, many of them are displayed upside down ― at least they used to in the past ― forcing you to flip them around to get a better look.

The trick about this “invention,” if you can call it that ― it is patented, by the way ― is that the solid contents like orange pulps inadvertently sink to the bottom of the cans and other containers, making it necessary to shake them before consuming them.

But since the opening is now at the bottom of the containers, consumers have little choice but to flip them upside down anyway and this is when the contents get “automatically” stirred up. Clever. Isn’t it?

These are small little wonders that make our lives just a little more pleasant and perhaps safer and I say, “Way to go, my man (or woman, for that matter).”

Then there is the other end of the scale when some inventions, for what they are worth, are simply a pain in the you-know-where and not worth a quarter of the time spent on them.

One example is the automated tap, and I have been trying to find the identity of the person who came up with this heinous idea so I can take him out to the middle of somewhere very public to have him or her shot, or otherwise humiliated.

The central concept of the automated faucet, as I discovered, is not to provide additional convenience to users, most of whom I am quite sure know how to turn on a water tap.

It was basically intended to conserve water since there happens to be quite a large number of people who decide they do not necessarily have the obligation to shut off the tap once they are finished, especially in public amenities.

So this individual set his mind to develop a piped water system which turns on and off by itself using sensors to the delight of his or her tiny little brain.

Why am I so critical of this new brand of service about which some people marvel? For one thing, it really does not serve the primary purpose that it was designed to.

Faucets, manual or automated, tend to break down and when this occurs, there is no way on heaven or Earth to shut the damn thing off.

Another little problem I experience is that while some of the better systems perform more meticulously, it tends to hit you with icy cold water in the middle of winter and there is really no means of controlling the temperature.

God gave me a good pair of hands and I would like sufficient opportunities to use them, thank you very much. So take your automated faucet and stuff it up your you-know-what (as mentioned above, this you-know-what refers to a bodily organ that comes in three letters beginning with the alphabet “a,” just in case you are wondering).

So inventions are good things, perhaps the best of things ― as professed by Tim Robbins in that movie “Shawshank Redemption”; actually, his exact expression was “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things” ― but they do come with a warning label: Don’t push it.

Jake Nho can be reached at jakenho@koreatimes.co.kr.