Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [88]
I’d like to form an organization of good sleepers and nappers. We’d demand the respect we deserve. We are people who dare drop off for a
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few minutes in the middle of the day. We’re an oppressed minority and we’re tired of it. Nappers of the world, unite!
Wastebaskets
What would you say are the ten greatest inventions of all time?
The wheel would have to be high on the list and so would the engine, steam or gasoline. The printing press, radio, airplane, the plow, telephone, cement, the spinning wheel, the automobile and now I guess you’d have to include the computer. How many’s that?
You can make your own list but don’t count discoveries. Discoveries are different from inventions. Nuclear energy, for instance, isn’t so much an invention as it is a discovery, like electricity or fire.
The propeller to drive a boat is a good invention although you wouldn’t put it in the top ten. Someone just suggested the zipper. I reject the zipper. It’s a handy gadget but it’s a gadget.
One of the things you never see mentioned in the schoolbooks when they talk about inventions is, in my mind, one of the greatest developments of all time. It is the wastebasket. I could live without laser beams, the phonograph record or the cotton gin, but I couldn’t do without a wastebasket.
If some historian wishes to make a substantial contribution to the history of mankind, he or she might find out who invented the wastebasket. It is time we had a National Wastebasket Day in that person’s honor.
There are four important wastebaskets in my life although we have nine altogether in our house. The four are in the bedroom, the kitchen, the room in which I write at home and my office away from home.
Day in and day out, I can’t think of anything that gives me more service and satisfaction than those wastebaskets.
I begin using a wastebasket early in the morning. When I’m getting dressed and I get ready to put the stuff on top of my dresser back in my pants pocket, I go through it and sort out the meaningless bits of paper I’ve written meaningless notes on. Those I throw in the wastebasket in order to give my pockets a clean start for the day. I make room for new meaningless bits of paper.
In my writing room, nothing is more important to me than my wastebasket. This essay takes only three pieces of paper, typed and double-spaced when it’s completed. You might not think so from some of the things you read in it but I seldom finish an essay in fewer than ten pages. You get three and the wastebasket gets seven.
The kitchen wastebasket is the only controversial one. Margie and I don’t always agree on what goes into it. There’s a fine line between what goes into the garbage can and what goes into the wastebasket.
The young people of today have television but one of the things they’re missing is the experience of burning the papers in the backyard. It was a very good thing to do because it was fun, and while you were doing it you got credit for working.
Most towns have ordinances prohibiting the burning of papers now. I approve of the law but I sure miss burning the papers. Taking the wastebaskets downstairs and out into the garage to dump them into the big trash container that the garbage man picks up is not nearly so satisfying a way of disposing of their contents as burning them used to be.
In recent years there’s been an unfortunate tendency to make wastebaskets more complicated and fancier than is necessary. Many of the good department stores and fancy boutiques have made them into gifts. A wastebasket is not a proper gift item. Many wastebaskets in these places have been decorated with flowers or clever things painted on them. A wastebasket doesn’t want to be clever and it doesn’t want to be so cute or gussied up that it calls attention