It’s under $50 and fits in the palm of your hand, and it’s guaranteed to change life on earth as we know it. Yesterday a good friend of mine unveiled the invention I’ve spent my whole life waiting for. It’s called the Audiovox ECCO Keychain Personal GPS, and at first glance, it is the magical device that is finally going to restore order to my chaos. And I found it right on the QVC website.
Click on it, and it comes with a promotional video. Right away, a handsome yet effeminate QVC representative had me hooked.
“Ever been to the mall and forgot where your car is?” he began.
I leaned a little bit closer to the computer screen.
“Ever been to the beach with your friends and forgot where everyone was sitting?” he continued.
A line of drool started to form from my bottom lip to the keyboard.
“This is a great item for those of us who are a little bit bird-brained,” he quipped.
If I was still single, this guy would have himself a stalker.
All you do is stand at your destination and hit a button, he explained. Walk away, and when it’s time to return, a little compass and GPS tells you which way to go.
My precious, what took you so long?
We all know that everything that’s not attached to a chain should come with a locator—pens, purses, wallets, glasses, marker caps, steaming coffee cups, keys. I’ve been watching Animal Planet for six consecutive days because I still can’t find the remote control. Yet the only thing that comes with a locator is a cordless phone. Without it, I’d have to buy a new phone every week.
It’s not that this device would help me find any of these things. But it was guaranteed to locate the one thing in my life that winds up lost the most: me.
I couldn’t order that keychain GPS locator fast enough. But in the time it took me to locate my purse and fumble through it in search of my credit card, it occurred to me that a keychain locator is, essentially, attached to a keychain. And it is a rare occasion that I can tell you, at any given moment, where my keychain is.
The only solution, of course, is to wait around for someone to invent a keychain GPS locator locator. And after I lose that, a keychain GPS locator locator locator. You can see where this is going.
And with that, my love affair with the QVC representative and his mesmerizing sales pitch ended even quicker than it began.
When it comes right down to it, the final solution lies in a satellite-controlled, microchip mind-locator surgically implanted somewhere between the hemispheres in our brains. “Lost your mind again? Turn left.”
So overdue is the mind-locator 2000 that I’m not going to bother to patent it. I’ll leave its creation to someone of a more efficient, non-birdbrained caliber. And as soon as it hits the market, I will be the first one to pull out my credit card. That is, if I can find it.