My wife and I had been together for several years, and in fact had moved from one town to another twice, when I had a “bright idea” –

A local auto repair shop was giving away free refrigerator magnets that were large enough to have advertising for a half dozen or more local merchants printed on the front.  One of the ads, for a business we didn’t have any need to use, was large enough that I had the thought of cutting it off.

Then, looking at it’s size and shape, I took some glue and put a piece of poster board paper over the front, and trimmed it to match.

Then I took a permanent marker and wrote in large block letters, about 1/3rd of the way down, “CLEAN”.   A flat rotation of 180 degrees and I wrote “DIRTY” across in about the same place.  We’ve used it on our dishwasher ever since.

But it had 2 weaknesses.  The paper was glued on, for starters.  The second was that it was a lightweight magnet, and bent easily.  So several years later, it’s not in very good shape.

I went on eBay a couple of days ago, and found that there are nearly a DOZEN different variations on the same idea that are ready to sell for under $10 USD – with free shipping.

Not such a shabby idea, was it?  I should have tried to market them when I had the idea in the first place.