No More Senseless Loss of Lives

Every year, 40,000 Americans die in car accidents. 57% of these accidents (a percentage I just made up) are due to distractions—things like dialing a cell phone, changing the radio station, fixing your hair. These little acts make people take their eyes off the road just long enough to get in an accident.

Many modern inventions are helping to prevent the act of taking your eyes off the road. Voice activated cell phones let you avoid typing in someone’s number. Controls on the steering wheel let you change the radio station without looking at the dashboard. And products like mousse and wax keep your hair in place so you don’t have to mess with it while you drive.

But what about tissues? It doesn’t happen very often, but every once in a while, my nose gets a ticklin’ while I’m driving. Sometimes even a little drippy. I look around for a box of tissues, but it’s not in my front seat. So I hold the wheel in one hand and scrounge around the back of my car with the other hand, blindly trying to find the box. Then, SLAM! I t-bone a bus carrying orphans on their way to their Make a Wish requests.

No one wants that to happen. And yet the design of the box of tissues prevents it from staying in one part of the car—it’s always going to slide around. You can buy small boxes that fit into your center console, but digging around in there is apt to distract you as well.

Consider this: a round tissue box that fits into a car cup holder. So if you’re the driver, you’ve got your Pepsi in one cup holder, and a circular, upright box of tissues in the other. It would be just big enough that you’d have to slightly squeeze it into the cup holder—that way, when you pull out a tissue, the whole cylinder doesn’t come with it.

Make it happen, Kleenex.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from jameystegmaier.com

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue Reading