DementedBlogger

Have you ever gone shopping for a specific item, one that would suite your needs perfectly, only to find that some genius decided to build a better mouse trap, and failed?

I needed a desk lamp, I say needed because I wound up buying two, not because I needed two, but because there was a better mouse trap….

I need to get pictures of a model car, a small 1/25th scale car and the first pictures were too dark. So I cured the problem with a desk lamp, or rather thought I did. New lamp, new pictures, new dark spots, not a good thing to publish in a printed format.

They once made a fluorescent desk lamp that was pose-able. I say once because someone decided a good thing could be changed and in doing so they ruined a perfectly good light. The light I wanted is no longer available, no doubt a marketing genius discovered I would want one this year and rushed to produce a smaller light he could charge me four times what the old lights cost, for a quarter of the light produced.

It would take five or six of these little gems to light up a book, using the new marketing ploy of “natural light”, the only problem I can see with these new lights is that they are made to sit on a desk instead of attaching directly to the forehead where you could actually see with one.

After delving deeply into the sixth store’s shelves, picking the brains of all the sales associates that fell out of the wood work,we reached the conclusion that there were no more simple fluorescent lights to be had.

We found magnifying lights, desk lamps in every shape and size, clip on lights, battery operated lights, touch lamps, decorator lamps and even very expensive lamps that still would not work for my needs regardless of needing financing to close the deal….

After wasting hours of my time and several gallons of gas used to fuel the search, I returned to Wally world and purchased a twin of the first lamp, another 60 watt wonder.

The moral of this story? If you see a ten or twelve inch fluorescent pose-able desk lamp at a yard sale, don’t hesitate, buy it right then and there, put it in storage and wait for the day that you need one…. You never know when it will happen, the day you have to have one, the one day in your life where only a small fluorescent desk lamp can make or break your day.

Thomas H. Forthe