Important Innovation
Astounded by the simplest ideas
I’m working on fairly substantial (and ridiculous) piece I will hopefully be ready to post in the coming days. In the meantime, after the (relative) smash success of my last newsletter which broke the news of Cookson’s tenuous coaching position, I didn’t want to go an entire week without writing anything. Then I was going through the pictures on my phone, and discovered something quite simple I wanted to write about.
That, as you can plainly see, is a rack of bowling balls. I took the boys bowling a few Saturday’s ago because it can’t possibly go one fucking weekend this fall without raining and I had to get the kids out of the house before I burned it to the ground. Rory likes the arcade at this particular bowling alley, but before I let him play games I told him he and Declan both had to bowl one game with me. Time wasting, baby! But they both actually usually will enjoy the game at least for the first seven frames or so. It’s good collaboration…I let Rory aim the little ramp thing for Declan’s turn, I help D carry the ball up and then he pushes it down the ramp. Lovely family activity.
That’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about a brilliant innovation that transformed the bowling experience. While I have not bowled all that often in my life, I have done it enough to know the most important — and often annoying — element is choosing the correct ball. The first step is choosing the weight. That’s usually easy enough, but then it becomes a whole process of finding a ball of the right weight that feels good with the finger holes (I’m sure there is a technical term for these with a bowling ball, but for my purposes it’s going to be finger holes). Sometimes the two at the top don’t feel quite right, or the gap between those and the thumb doesn’t feel quite right. Or for me, the most common problem, is that the two fingers fit fine, but then the thumb is a bit too tight. But at some point it becomes diminishing returns on searching for the perfect bowling ball and you find one that works reasonably well and get on with the business of rolling a disappointing 122 or whatever.
Yet this time, I discovered some unknown genius has solved the problem. It has been awhile since I’ve bowled, so maybe this innovation has been in place for years and I simply didn’t know. But as I tried to find a ball that met my needs, I discovered there are now two sets of thumb holes! One on each side of the two finger slots. And not only that, they have appropriately labeled them (you will see in the picture above they are “large” and “medium).
Yes. Yes, yes, one-thousand times yes. Of course this makes sense. It makes so much sense it’s hard to believe it took this long for someone to come up with the idea. The alley does not need to buy as many balls. The customers are happier (presumably…I can’t imagine what weirdo wouldn’t love this innovation). I see absolutely no downside. In this case, more importantly, I was able to pick out an acceptable bowling ball in about 45 seconds, allowing me to not leave my children unsupervised for very long as Rory was climbing on top of the ball return and Declan had wandered into another lane to say hello to complete strangers.
It would be overstating things to say this somehow made the rest of the day go incredibly smoothly. I can confidently say it did not. Yet I find myself so happy by these small little solutions that it provides a little bit of delight in a — yet another — rainy day. Someone saw a small annoyance and fixed it. This is worth celebrating. Kudos to you, bowling ball innovator. I appreciate your contributions and salute your endeavor.
Brilliant. Haven’t see this.