A TALE OF TWO INVENTORS

     Thomas Addison felt that it was his destiny to become a great inventor. This idea came to him as a child, simply because of his name's similarity to Thomas Edison. He did not believe in coincidences.

     Unfortunately, unlike Edison, Addison was not very inventive. 

     Like all children who aspire to invention, he would take apart appliances he found in his family's home to see how they worked. But unlike the others, Thomas could never put them back together again, and his parents would get angry and send him to bed without dinner, dessert or pajamas.

     When he reached adulthood, Thomas embarked on a quest to invent a perpetual motion machine using only items he found in his shed. After five years of futility, a less driven (insane?) man would have given up, but Thomas simply decided he needed a new shed.

     Of course, perpetual motion machines are generally thought to be impossible.

     His wife would ridicule his dream on a regular basis.

     "Nothing runs forever, my delusional husband.”

     "Oh, yeah? What about Meet The Press?"

     One day while he was out in the back yard collecting fireflies, or lightning bugs (hoping to harness their "lightning"), he heard unmistakable inventor sounds coming from the garage next door: tapping, sawing, explosions, cursing, grinding of teeth, etc.

     He walked over, and the garage door was open. Inside, a little gnome of a man was sitting at a work table with an intense look on his face, staring at a collection of useless junk. "Mmm, neat useless junk!" thought Thomas.

     "Hi, neighbor," said Thomas cheerily. 

     "Hello," said his neighbor without looking up.

     "I'm Thomas. I live next door."

     "I'm  Alexander."

     "What are you working on?"

     "Oh, nothing," said Alexander. "I just like to tinker."

     "Me too."

     "What do you tinker with?"

     "Oh, nothing. Well, gotta go. Nice meeting you."

     "Same here."

     What Thomas didn't know was that his neighbor's full name was Alexander Graham Cracker, and he was also an inventor, also insane, and he, too, was working on a perpetual motion machine. 

     What were the odds?

     Maybe there ARE no coincidences. 

     It almost makes you think.