Squirrel Bait and Other Stories

by Thomas P. Hanna

  The Never-Ready-Good-For-Nothing Gadget

  Hiram Wilderstein stood at his office window humming and smiling to himself as he watched the pedestrians hurrying along the street two stories below. He raised his glass of ginger ale and toasted the passersby below. “To your curiosity and sense of challenge, my friends. And to my good fortune. May it be literally so,” he added quietly.

  He turned back to the little office, crowded to overflowing with boxes of papers and drawings from his many aborted business ventures. Never before had he had so much response to one of his advertisements and this was only the first day. He had sensed from the moment that the idea popped into his imagination that this would be the big one that would make his fortune for sure and it certainly looked like he had been right.

  As far back as he could remember Hiram had had visions of making a lot of money without working very hard. Even in high school he had been quietly evaluating the potential of various careers from that point of view. He had decided that the logical thing was to sell, and the way to sell with the minimum of overhead was by mail order. The only real question left when he graduated from high school was what to sell. Now after a dozen years and some thirty different products he had apparently found it.

  It was all really so simple. When he had completed a course on advertising and consumer motivation at the community college it had come to him in a flash. People disliked products that advertised themselves as something they weren’t and at the same time many people seemed to have more money than they knew what to do with so they were forever throwing it away on junk, fads, and useless gadgets.

  If that’s how they operate, then that’s where I should meet them. I’ll supply them with an honestly presented product and tease them with a little challenge - and I’ll clean up, he concluded. So the Never-Ready-Good-For-Nothing Gadget was born. An ounce and a half of gold-colored wire connecting four pieces of flat plastic, each a different size, color, and shape. It was, as far as Hiram could determine after a full month of playing with it, completely useless for any practical purpose whatsoever. While he was in the process of developing his ad he had given the thing to a number of friends and acquaintances to see if any of them could think of a possible use for it. No one could.

  His small ads read simply, The Never-Ready-Good-For-Nothing Gadget. Believed to be completely useless. Great challenge for gifts, parties, etc. Only $3.50. Available only by mail order.

  And the orders and the checks poured in.

  After several days it became obvious that the demand would hold for at least a few months, so Hiram shopped out the actual assembly and packaging of the devices to give him freedom to concentrate on promotional activities. He understood full well that promotion was the critical element in the success of any product for which there wasn’t a clear and real need - which he estimated to include more than fifty percent of the products on the market any given day.

  All of his life Hiram had been an observer of people and their behavior. At six years of age he had made a killing in baseball cards by shrewdly playing on human nature. He had collected by every honest means available to him (purchase, trade, barter, and cajoling) the picture cards of the Yellow Sox and the Buzzards, the two teams at the bottom of the ratings at the beginning of the baseball season. The other kids were happy to give him several of these losers for one of the favorites.

  At midseason the bubblegum company stopped making the cards, as Hiram had overheard his neighbor predict they would back in the spring. Then the Yellow Sox surprised everyone except Hiram and his neighbor old Mr. McGee by moving into first place. Mr. McGee, who was the biggest baseball fan Hiram had ever met, had once played professional ball himself for two seasons with the Yellow Sox, the team that was now tearing up the league. He had told Hiram repeatedly that this was the year for the Sox to go all the way. He could feel it in his bones. Hiram didn’t tell anyone else about this prediction; he just gathered all of the Yellow Sox bubblegum cards he could get his hands on.

  When almost overnight the Yellow Sox cards were the ones most in demand and he had neatly cornered the market in them, the other kids had to line up to haggle for their new favorites to tuck under their pillows and to inspire them and bring them luck by being carried in their jeans pocket when they themselves approached the mound or the batter’s box. They paid premium price for the Yellow Sox cards.

  They also paid a good price for the Buzzard player’s cards although that team was still in last place because Hiram had been actively spreading the idea of using these cards as dart board targets, kitsch collector’s items, and insulting little bad luck gifts to one another. Many a third grade first baseman received an envelope containing one of these dreaded cards in the mail the day before an important game and became so superstitiously unsettled that his game was completely ruined.

  Promotion was intuitive to Hiram. He had a sense of it, a feeling for what would or wouldn’t work for a particular product. Any advertising firm could have made a fortune by paying him good money to assess their campaigns, but without the right courses on his transcript and the right connections in the back offices he couldn’t even get his nose in their doors. Not that he really wanted to. He had always believed he would be best off as his own boss. He needed complete freedom to function well. Now he set to work with a passion.

  First he sent copies of a cleverly worded little article about the newest fad, the Never-Ready-Good-For-Nothing Gadget, to several hundred college newspapers across the country. More than half of them ran the piece and soon orders were pouring in from alert campus bookstore managers who knew a moneymaker when they saw one. The gadget became the fall semester campus rage.

  Hiram took considerable pride in the fact that in less than a calendar year from their introduction to the market the NiRGiNs (sounds like virgins), as they were now almost universally known, were the basis of college level credit courses in design and utility at more than two dozen colleges and universities. NiRGiNs made Frisbees and hula hoops look like exotica.

  When conservative groups around the country began to organize public demonstrations in protest of the commercialization and exultation of uselessness, Hiram readily agreed to debate their spokespersons in various public forums. He even quietly supported their activities through anonymous donations. “Exposure is exposure,” he was inclined to say. “And exposure sells the product.”

  When Jay Leno and Dave Letterman both toyed with the things on camera the same week the sales doubled overnight. For months very little except word of mouth was required to keep sales high. The product had a kind of self-perpetuating sales appeal. During those months Hiram carefully prepared for the next big campaign - to be launched when, and only when, the interest began to flag as reflected in sales figures and public exposure.

  But with his feel for such things Hiram sensed the diminution of interest before the sales reports gave any clear indication of it and he was ready to move immediately. With considerable fanfare, which included an expensive TV saturation campaign in seven major markets, he launched NiRGiN 2, an entirely different but equally useless device with a contest offering $100 prizes to anyone who could come up with any practical use for the thing. The basic model sold for $5 and was an overnight success.

  Entries for the contest poured in and each was evaluated by one of a panel of big name experts from several fields that Hiram had hired to act as judges. Those ideas that were approved by their first reader were passed on to the entire panel for evaluation. Each idea that was awarded a $100 prize was carefully written up in a lavishly illustrated large format soft cover book called “The NiRGiN Use Book”. The next Christmas these sold as a great novelty gift item for $12.98 and sold 20,000 copies the first week. Eventually it would be followed by the Use Books II, III and IV. Complete sets became collector’s items and were traded on eBay regularly.

  Hiram knew that he had made a real contribution to culture when Miami, St. Louis, and Spokane all bid on a super-sized sculpture NiRGiN 2 designed to be d
isplayed in the courtyard of a city hall. Nieman-Marcus devoted a full page in their annual Christmas catalog to a diamond encrusted platinum version for $150,000.

  The temptation to try to keep the momentum going by coming up with more and more useless or trivial products was very real, and many of his advisers recommended that line of action, but Hiram didn’t let himself fail into it.

  He explained to a TV interviewer, “There has to be responsibility at the bottom of it all. There’s a time for playing silly games and thumbing your nose at conventional wisdom. NiRGiNs were a way for people to do something wild, something slightly unconventional, something crazy – but do it without destroying their pocketbooks, their integrity, or their sense of humor. There’s a limit though. Cross that fine line and large numbers of people suddenly realize you’ve stopped giving them a giggle and are now giving them the finger. Nobody likes to be played for a fool. Besides, this attitude implies that I had no serious intention in starting this whole thing, and that simply isn’t true. I have had a serious purpose behind what I’ve done from the very beginning.”

  In the next few months Hiram was very busy making contacts and arranging meetings. He carefully avoided all publicity about his actions and intentions during this period, keeping the public attention riveted on the product. Sales of NiRGiNs remained substantial although the decline had begun.

  On April first, Hiram held a news conference at which he announced the formation of a non-profit corporation to be called the Institute for the Study of Applied Uselessness. The staff of the Institute would include a number of internationally known scientists and thinkers, backed by a virtual army of technicians and tinkerers.

  Hiram explained, “The purpose of the Institute is to demonstrate that there are very few things in our world that can’t be put to some practical use if we give full consideration to their potential. The Institute will study both the practical applications of various devices, processes, and materials, and the processes of human mental activity that so often restrict and limit our thinking so we overlook many applications of the resources we have available.

  “It is anticipated that the Institute will make valuable contributions in the form of new products and processes, in additional uses for existing ones, and in basic understanding of human psychology. As of this date the Institute has already been awarded seven major study grants by the Federal Government and a number of contracts to undertake studies for international organizations have been entered into.”

  “Sir, is it the intention of the Institute to make uselessness obsolete - possibly within our lifetimes?” a reporter asked with a smirk.

  Hiram answered seriously, “No, it’s only our intention to make it less prevalent. We feel that a certain amount of uselessness is desirable, possibly even essential, to human affairs.”

  “Can you explain that a bit?” another reporter asked. “That seems to go against the whole current of thought in the modern world.”

  Hiram smiled slightly as if he were happy that someone had picked up on the matter and given him a chance to elaborate on the point. “There are two things in our lives that many people presume modern scientific thought is constantly trying to do away with. One is a sense of wonder at the marvelous workings of the natural world. Non-scientists often assume the scientists want to be able to explain everything in mechanistic terms and that there will no longer be any sense of awe and wonder. The other thing is our failure to find some economically useful purpose or use for everything. People assume that the only reason scientists and others study anything is to discover its practical economic uses and they have no interest beyond that in anything animal, vegetable, or mineral.

  “However, neither of these assumptions is true. Quite on the contrary. The sense of wonder is precisely what fuels most of the scientific research. Wonder at the marvelous mechanisms when we can work out their details, and even more at the complexities within apparently simple systems that keep their secrets beyond the reach of our most advanced technologies.

  “In much the same way the realization that certain creatures or features of the natural world are there and are perpetuated year after year without their serving any function in our lives emphasizes that we’re only part of the overall universe and the whole universe exists alongside of us and despite us, but not entirely for us.

  “There’s something bigger than humanity, call it what you will. Uselessness reflects the fact that there’s a power and an intelligence beyond our own and some things around us we can only admire and marvel at, not use and possibly not even understand. That’s their part in this world. To be things that we can simply marvel at, delight in, and accept as they are.

  “I personally believe we’d all be poorer if we didn’t have some useless things in our lives. I’d include most of the arts under this general heading, as well as the appreciation of wilderness and natural beauty. One of the things I hope to see documented by the studies of the Institute is the real effect of these things that we judge to be useless in our lives. Without in any way attempting to prejudice the results of such research, let me say that I suspect we’ll find having some useless things in our lives is essential to our mental health.”