Phone Privacy Cubicles
Tired of strangers in the cafe giving you dirty looks while you’re on your cell trying to be heard over the noise of the cappuccino machine? In the middle of a Zoom meeting when the poet at the next table suddenly spills their latte on your laptop? Imagine a soundproof, clear rectangular cubicle where anyone can go to make telephone calls, isolated from the eavesdropping of a bunch of unemployed actors and overcaffeinated retirees. Who wouldn’t like a private, quiet spot to conduct important or intimate conversations? A savvy entrepreneur could start the Phone Booth™ business by putting cubicles on urban street corners, or inside coffee shops, malls, airports and other noisy high traffic areas and charging a nominal fee to pay for the booths’ installation and upkeep, say 25 cents for every three minutes of use, payable in some sort of digital token. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?
Green Money
What if there was some way to make necessary payments for purchases that was universally accepted anywhere you went, with no added bank fees or the hassle of proving your identity and signing your name every time you wanted to buy a candy bar? Also, wouldn’t it be great to be able to use this method of payment for items that you didn’t want any other person, corporate entity, or government to track where or what you’d bought? Believe it or not this miracle form of money still exists (for now), and as an added bonus, unlike crypto, doesn’t require millions of kilowatt hours and the destruction of rainforest and farm fields for data mining operations.
Make Election Day a National Holiday
Why do citizens still need to stand in long lines before or after work on a random Tuesday (Tuesday? Really?) in order to make the most important decisions for the future of our society?
In addition to all the other ways voting should be made easier and more pleasant, such as automatic registration of every citizen when they turn 18, and having the PTA ladies at the bake sale in front of our school polling place use real butter in their brownie recipes, turning Election Day into a National Holiday would be a terrific way to celebrate what is truly great about our democracy: the constitutional right to free and fair elections. And when have the American people ever voted against having another national holiday?
Paper Maps
Are you sick of the GPS lady telling you to turn right at the next junction only to find yourself on some gravel farm road, lost and out of range of any cell phone tower to reconnect you with her confusing and inconsistent directions? Wouldn’t you like to know what’s beyond the scope of the tiny screen on your phone in order to see where these roads are taking you? Consider getting a paper map. Tried and true technology that shows you details you’ll never get from Google or Apple Maps, like the name of the scenic river or lake you’ve been riding beside for the last fifty miles, or that mountain up ahead that appears to be having an avalanche.
Books
Are you drained from staring at a screen all day to gather information? Don’t you wish that you could relax somewhere away from an internet connection and read a complete story, without being interrupted by urgent texts, calls and notifications?
Try a book! This amazing technology is portable, quiet, and comprehensive. And if you live near almost any urban area or small town you can usually get an almost unlimited supply for free from a public library.
Customer Service Representatives
There’s nothing like talking to a real live human being to help you when you’re trying to order something, or complete a form on a website, and it’s just not working. Really, there’s nothing like talking to a real live human being anymore when you’re having a problem, because all the big corporations have decided to replace us with phone trees, chatbots and artificial intelligence. If it were up to me, I’d cut down all the phone trees, take them to the appropriate corporate headquarters and use them as kindling to burn down the offices of any corporate executive who imagined this was a good way to save money and serve their customers. Companies that put a premium on great human customer service have the opportunity to become the most successful, as well as helping the rest of us biological entities avoid a robot apocalypse.
The Pencil
Are you tired of your laptop running low on power and glitching out right before you’ve had the chance to save your latest epic brainstorm? Sick of Microsoft Word’s unending helpful suggestions and interruptions, like when it suddenly insists that your software subscription has run out and until you pay up you can’t make any further changes to your document? The Pencil is the perfect solution to all your writing problems. Extremely affordable and portable (it fits in your pocket!), it never needs charging and can even write sideways or upside down. The pencil is amazingly versatile and requires no toggling if you want to change font sizes or even draw pictures or diagrams anywhere on the page. And if you make a mistake simply flip it over and use the handy built-in erase feature. It’s also great for editing any document on the fly, as well as making notes, cartoons, or dirty doodles in the margins of books, or bathroom stalls.
Read the June 2026 issue of Funny Times
