fine whine

Sometimes I give the impression that I am very busy at work, and don't have time to do anything other than my official responsibilities*. While I would not want to dispel that impression, I do know that I occasionally get distracted and find myself doing things other than work at my desk.

There's something to be said about all work and no play, they say...

One major facet of my job, albeit one often overlooked, is hanging garments on hangers. I know it sounds very, very exciting, but the real tedium sets in from the sheer number of garments that need to be hung, and accordingly, the never ending boxes filled with hangers on which to hang them.

Let me tell you about hangers. All of the hangers we use are not created equally, and many of them aren't even made by the same companies. I imagine our specifications for the hangers are relatively loose (they need to have a hook on top, two shoulder-like protrusions, and whenever possible, some capability to be cascaded) and as such we end up with something of a mix.

I don't really spend much time thinking about the hangers, but one day recently I did notice that one of them was stamped with a patent number. Knowing that among the wealth of knowledge accessible by Google is a patent database (or two), I looked up that patent (5096101 for the curious) and learned a few things, among them, these:

* There are a number of patents for hangers, which would ostensibly be very simple things.
* The patent in question was for a feature not on this hanger - the little tab between the hanger and the hook that shows the size, or other information (as seen at Target).

So this is ultimately what I have found: A&E Products has somehow stamped some of their hangers with an almost completely irrelevant patent number.

As opposed, say, to writing a completely irrelevant post.

* Time that could be spent otherwise on things like, oh, posting to a website, for example. I've back-dated this entry to around the second week or so I didn't post it, but meant to do so.