The Smallest Victories Count the Most

I’m feeling a little bit like Manchester University’s Innovator of the Year today. A bit of background info: every year Manchester honors a person who recognizes a problem and develops an innovative solution. Just last month, the 2012-2013 Innovator of the year, Temple Grandin, came to campus to speak.

I’m not quite up to par with Temple, but I did have a couple small innovative victories today. I have this cute little robo-dwarf hamster named Khaleesi (after a Game of Thrones character). Khaleesi is a runner. She’s on her wheel non-stop. It’s one of those metal wheels, and since it’s been about six months since we got her the wheel all the paint has worn off the axles. Every time she gets on the wheel it squeaks. Actually, I’m understating how loud and annoying that wheel has been. It was worse than scraping a metal fork on a ceramic plate.  

I’m proud to say that today I found a solution! I’ve tried a couple things before. I got one of those “silent” wheels, but immediately discovered that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get the wheel to sit up on the fluffy bottom of her cage, but mostly it wouldn’t work because it grossed me out that it didn’t have the convenient spaces that the metal one did so when she pooped while she ran it would just fall out. After that, I thought about putting WD 40 on it but was too afraid because I didn’t want to put something in her cage that could make her sick. Today, after someone begging me to take her wheel out, I thought to myself, “Hey! Why not try vegetable oil? Surely that can’t hurt her if she can even get to it.” And it works! I can see her running her little heart out, but can’t hear a thing! Amazing!

That was probably my best idea of the day, especially since the only other idea I had was to play Minecraft instead of working ahead on homework or reading more of Dracula. Minecraft is where I found my other innovative spark today. As a child, I always wanted a horse (like almost every other little girl at some point in childhood) but never even got the chance to ride one. I found horses on the Minecraft world I was playing on on today and thought to myself, “Hey! You’ve never ridden a horse in real life, why not try it on the computer?” I got a bunch of materials together, made a lead and a saddle, and tamed a horse so I could ride it! And it was actually kind of fun since I had to put in a lot of work to be able to do so.

Though my innovations were small and only really affected me, I felt pretty good. I’ve never had the chance to ride a horse so I invented a new (digital) way for me to do so, and I didn’t want to make my hamster sick so I used resources available to me to come up with a new way to grease her wheel. I would say that under the circumstances, I was pretty innovative. Maybe MU could start offering students small awards for small accomplishments like that? I think an ice cream cone would suffice.