Some of you may know the couple of young fellas from Chappy who graduated from engineering school and got jobs at Tesla in the design department. They were the guys who thought up the idea of using glue to hold the parts of the Tesla trucks together. They convinced their supervisors that it was fool proof and you probably have heard the rest of the story. I know a little something about the long and twisting path that a very good idea must go down before it reaches actual production. These two guys are not to blame for the end result. They were not part of quality control at Tesla.

Anyway, they have a lot of free time on their hands now. They asked me the other day if I would like to hear about an idea that they had come up with for a solution to the vehicle headlight problem at the ferry. You know, the difficulty we have in trying to protect the eyesight of the ferry captains from those darn LED headlights and unnecessarily bright parking lights on new cars and truck. Even with a big sign explaining what we ask you to do about your headlights and why we ask you to do it both day and night and even suggest how you can do it and even supply a big mirror so that you can see what we’re talking about, people still sit at the head of the line with their headlights blinding the ferry captains maneuvering the ferryboats into the slips.

The basic problem is that headlight switches in vehicles these days don’t respond to manipulation by the vehicle driver. It’s an uphill battle for folks to learn how to operate their headlights and it’s only getting worse. So, my two geniuses came up with a concept that takes the responsibility out of the hands of the vehicle drivers.

They described their idea in great detail. It’s quite clever. It’s a tiny set of venetian blinds that stick to the front of your vehicle with suction cups. The blinds are open when you are driving down the street letting the light illuminate your path. When you get to the ferry waiting line, the blinds can be closed to block the light from annoying the ferry captain. Guess how they get closed? The ferry captain has a garage door opener kind of remote control that tells the venetian blinds on your vehicle to close up, completely blocking the light from escaping.

The vehicle drivers won’t need to concern themselves with the negative impacts of their glaring lights. Once the ferry boat lands, the captain hits the remote switch again, the venetian blinds open up and your headlights shine your way safely onto the ferry. If your vehicle has head lights that don’t want to turn off for five minutes after you shut the engine off, we simply hit the button again and, voila’, there are no more headlight beams aimed out over the water blinding the launch drivers.

The boys would like to do an actual trial run of their idea. They have set up a 3D printer to make the parts. Now they are looking for volunteers to allow the contraptions to be attached to their vehicles. Remember it’s with suction cups so it won’t hurt the paint job. They say that they have been in contact with the United States patent office. They say that they have an appointment next Tuesday. I’m slightly suspicious about the whole thing since Tuesday is April 1.