By Ryan Cassidy, Chief Technician TrinkeTron Project at Unicorp Industries
If you want to be taken seriously as an Inventor, Engineer, Artist, Scientist, or anything else in the realm of innovation and ideas, you need to have a good drawing board. Most of the time, when you hear the phrase “Well, it looks like it’s back to the drawing board”, it is in reference to an idea that didn’t work out very well, and they’re speaking metaphorically, wrapping a contrite cliche around a poorly-planned idea as a means of easing the sting of abject failure: “Oops! The laser can’t properly distinguish mosquitos from children and fires indiscriminately! Looks like it’s back to the drawing board!”. Consider for a moment that perhaps lying at the root cause of the failure, like a piece of shoddy furniture abandoned on the curb of innovation, is a piece of shoddy furniture, a poorly-constructed drawing board (or worse, no drawing board at all, just empty space where a good drawing board should be!). Consider how the quality of the drawings produced are impacted directly by the drawing board, and consider how a picture, being worth exactly one thousand words, could obviate the need for such a long-winded, Archimedian introductory paragraph to a progress report about the importance of drawing boards! Consider that this, dear readers, is how bad ideas come to be, and how good ideas fail; badly designed or downright non-existent drawing boards. As I always say, if you have a good drawing board, you’ll have good ideas. Thus, dear readers, I present to you a picture of my ideal drawing board (sparing the additional seven hundred and twenty-five more words that would be used to adequately describe it):
As you can see, the design is a mixture of elegant simplicity and functionality, perfectly suited to the task of drawing diagrams for engenius world-changing inventions. There are little accessible slots to keep organized all the tools of the trade (pens, pencils, erasers, cutters, rulers), a small dish to hold candies or cigarette butts or tears, and the cabinets below the desk contain 12 separate shelves where finished drawings can be shelved. The drawing surface on top can be comfortably angled to 45 degrees or lay flat, slide left to right as needed, or be removed entirely to free up space. This, dear readers, is a drawing board I don’t mind going back to!
People often ask me where I get the ideas for my inventions and I always say “The Drawing Board of course!” and after they chuckle, I then I show them the picture of my drawing board.
Thankfully, nobody has ever asked how I invented such a perfect drawing board without having first invented such a perfect drawing board with which to invent it, but I digress.
“What does all of this have to do with the TrinkeTron Turbo 2000 project?” you may ask. The answer is as follows: Very little, dear reader, for this is mostly about the importance of having a good drawing board, but since you asked, here are some of the preliminary drawings used in the early stages of the TrinkeTron’s development complete with redundant explanatory captions:
TrinkeTron TURBO 2000 