We could call it Jiffy-tooth

I was recently sitting in a Jiffy Lube in order to fulfil my civic duty to have my car inspected by representatives of the state of North Carolina. These representatives were of course Jiffy Lube employees and not, unfortunately, elected officials; though I might have paid double to see the honorable governor Mike Easley out there checking my tail pipe. That would have at least been entertaining. Instead of being thus entertained, I was stuck being bored in the traditional car place waiting room. The kind with the following standard accouterments: old magazines, a couple newspapers that had been read a few dozen times, hard plastic chairs, the two part gumball machine full of runts and nuts, the overpriced soda machine, the unisex bathroom (door slightly ajar), television mounted to the ceiling with FOX news on just loud enough to make listening to my iPod difficult, but not loud enough to be understood. It was this last piece of essential car place waiting room decor that got my mind to thinking.

I wasn't really all that interested in watching the FOX news program, but as a typical American I find myself drawn to the shimmering screen whenever or wherever it is. I've found in my life that even if nothing is on, I'll sit there and flip through channels aimlessly and be perfectly content to bask in the glow of mediocre programming. I discovered while I was sitting in the Jiffy Lube that the thing I found most annoying in this particular situation wasn't that FOX news was on, but that the sound on the TV was set at just the right volume to prevent me from understanding what was being said while simultaneously being loud enough to ruin everything else. It was at this point that I thought to myself, why not just broadcast the sound on bluetooth or something like that, so that if I didn't want to hear it, I could just turn off my bluetooth earpiece. Of course in my circumstance, I don't own a bluetooth earpiece, so my options would have been slightly limited if the aforementioned situation had it in fact been the reality. However, failing to hear the FOX program would have allowed me to listen to my iPod in peace.

After I left the Jiffy Lube with my freshly certified roadworthy sticker I continued to contemplate the magnitude of this thought. It occurred to me that this idea could go way beyond auto shop waiting rooms. It could extend to all waiting rooms and beyond! Imagine for a moment that you're at the airport, and you actually make it through security with time to spare before your flight. You're sitting there at the gate, doing what? Staring up at the TV showing CNN or something like that. Of course since the airport authority doesn't want to bother anyone in a busy terminal they don't play the sound, they just put it on closed captioning, so that you end up reading the lines to the story about a forest fire in California while the TV's showing video from last nights political debate (hold on that might actually work). What if you could just slip on an ear piece, tune in the TV and listen instead of having to go through all the work and effort of reading lines that seem to have been written by laid off Japanese film translators? That would be great! You could take this idea to anywhere you can see a TV, but not hear it. It could be at the gym while you work out, a bar or restaurant (especially sports bars), a break room, in prison, the DMV, wherever. In fact this idea might be able to expand television into more public areas, which is great because if there's one thing this nation is deficient in it's television viewing time.