A tangled tale

Harold Smith stood at the open door of his aircraft looking down from an altitude of ten thousand feet at the scene spread out below him. The day was beautifully sunny, the air crystal clear so that the tiny fields below stood out with great clarity. Miniature cars meandered slowly along the thin strips of the local roads, whilst coming rapidly nearer he could see the extensive grounds of his summer home.

The moment had arrived and he leaped from the aircraft adopting a free fall position with the rapidity and grace of an expert. As soon as his fall stabilised he headed in the direction of his property.

He intended to land in a large roped off space near the marquee that had been erected to the rear of the house. A crowd of guests were waiting for his arrival, all of whom had been charged a great deal of money that would be donated to his favourite charity.

He smiled as he fell, none of the people below him would ever have acknowledged him as a child. His family had come from a poor area, he had a large number of brothers and sisters none of whom had been particularly bright at school but even so he’d always felt he was the runt of the litter. But by golly he’d shown them in the end!

He’d struggled through his schooling, leaving with no qualifications what so ever, barely able to read and write and in no possession of any employable skills. Strangely he eventually found a job in an electronics firm. The company produced printed circuit boards for sale to the industry and Harold finally found employment in the packing department. The boards were fragile and were sandwiched between two layers of bubble wrap. The material folded neatly round the ends of the board and then secured with a small piece of self adhesive tape.

He was a good worker, largely because he had absolutely no ambitions at all and was thus able to concentrate on the task at hand.

Every now and again one of the huge rolls of bubble wrap was used up and Harold and some of his friends used these off cuts to play at cowboys and Indians during the lunch break, popping the bubbles in the plastic sheeting pretending they were firing guns.
It was during one of these sessions that Harold had the idea that was to change the course of his whole life. He noticed that one or two of the older men also popped the bubbles rather absentmindedly, during the breaks. He shyly asked one of the men why he popped the sheet and was told that it helped pass the time and took his mind off any worries he might have.

Harold stopped playing cowboys and Indians with his friends and wandered around during the tea breaks listening to the worker’s conversations. It seemed that most people had worries that had never occurred to Harold. They worried about their houses, their children, where next weeks rent was coming from and how they were going to be able to afford any presents for the kids at Xmas.

It seemed that everyone was popping the bubbles in the plastic sheeting to calm their nerves while worrying about their problems. It was also during these overheard conversations that he first heard the word ‘stress.’

Now although Harold was daft by most people’s standards, his normally blank mind was the perfect canvas to accept a new idea and see the potential involved. Not everybody had access to bubble wrap in the quantities that he was used to. If the ordinary public had the same sort of problems as his workmates, surely he ought to be able to sell them small sheets of the stuff and make himself a bit of money.

He collected up several of the unused sheet ends and found one of the employees who could cut it neatly into small sheets. He showed the man what he wanted.

“About a hundred A4 sheets from those pieces my son, god only knows what games you’re going to play with that little lot.”

Harold went round his neighbours and offered to sell them his ‘stress relieving packs’ at ten pence a sheet.

To his surprise that were quickly snapped up by the men he talked to. The women were rather different in their approach.

“I can see the point dear, but it would be much nicer if they were a prettier colour don’t you think?”

Greatly daring he went to the buying department in his firm and asked if the packing materials came in any different colours. He was fortunate enough to find that the company had once used a bright blue sheet in another department. This colour had fallen out of favour after an experimental period when different colours were being assessed for use with different products. To cut a long story short he was able to buy the roll that was left and he ended up with several thousand bright blue A4 sheets.

To the amazement of his employers, he left his job and began selling the blue stress relieving kits at twenty pence a sheet. He invested his profits in whole rolls of coloured bubble wrap, eventually had some A4 envelopes printed and was soon selling the packed stress kit, each with five sheets inside for two pounds a pack.

He quickly developed a keen business sense and patented his idea just in time before it became too well known and was soon making money hand over fist.

Harold’s mind suddenly came back to the business in hand. Checking his wrist altimeter he found that so far he’d fallen about seven thousand feet in his sky dive, a little way to go yet then before his pressure sensitive alarm reminded him to pull the rip cord of his parachute.

He happily returned to his memories as he recalled the event that turned him into a multi millionaire. Sales of bubble wrap had begun to slow down as his customers found other fads to relieve their worries.

At this time of his life he was happily married with three children. He’d used the profits from his business sensibly and bought himself a house out in the country. He employed a couple of women to cut and pack his product and was really quite happy with life.

However sales were falling and he smiled as he remembered seeing one of the packers sitting on her stool patiently untangling a ball of string used to tie up bulk orders.

“I don’t mind doing this sir, it’s quite relaxing, but it would be more efficient if we had a ball of string that didn’t get tangled up, it would speed up the packing a lot!”

Two weeks later Smith’s tangled string hit the market with tremendous sales impact. Coloured tangled string followed rapidly and a year later Harold became a multi millionaire. He’d bought a large country estate, his own aeroplane and taken up sky diving as a hobby. He was heading for his home at the moment and all his prospects looked rosy.
His altitude alarm went off at this point and he brought himself back into the present as he pulled the rip cord on his parachute. Nothing appeared to happen and he glanced up at the ‘chute which had ‘candled’ above him.

Not to worry, these things happened occasionally!

The fail safe ‘chute began to open but almost immediately a loud flapping vibration began above his head while there was no noticeable difference to the speed at which the ground was approaching.

He looked up to see what had happened and began to laugh as the irony of the situation struck him. The strings of the two parachutes above him had tangled together in an insoluble knot.

He was still laughing as he hit the ground.

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