WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014!

Background: The video game Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a dystopian corporate future where life is cheap, but it (surprisingly) features a courteous automotive safety feature.

The Issue: As anyone who has worn a baseball cap knows, the brim does a passable job of shading the wearer’s eyes, but it provides inadequate coverage to the sides of the face and back of the neck, both of which are prime sunburn spots.

Background: A trend started in the 2020s where car owners would affix stickers to their car reading “Student Driver: Please Be Patient!”

The Issue: In grocery stores, many snacks are sold in gigantic jumbo size packages.

The Issue: Depending on climate and the distance from a hot water heater to a shower, it can take 60+ seconds of running a shower to finally get warm water from the shower head.

Background: In the ancient times of “video arcades,” progress in a game was partially limited by the number of quarters in a player’s pocket.

Background: One great idea for encouraging people to get exercise is the 2012 phone app “Zombies, Run!”

Background: When learning a foreign language, it can be difficult to advance beyond the stage of extremely basic competency.

Background: One major concern for any civilization that lasts for more than a few billion years is: what is the best long-term method to reliably store and retrieve energy?

Background: Many people find the relentless piling up of emails in their inbox to be stressful.

The Issue: Dining venues often provide a “customer copy” of a receipt (Figure 1).

The Issue: Art museums have their merits, but they are rarely described as “interactive.”

The Issue: When a person is walking around a corner, there’s always a chance that they’ll unluckily collide with someone walking the opposite way (Figure 1).

The Issue: Many movies feature a protagonist who the audience sympathizes with, despite the fact that in real life, that same audience might disapprove of such a person.

The Issue: Washing machines and clothes dryers save an immense amount of time.

Background: Many common household pets have the properties of being soft, furry, and generally snuggleable.

Background: A simple observation: as creatures have become more complex and develop advanced societies, they tend to use fewer limbs for locomotion and more limbs for manipulating the world.

The Issue: Income sources and expenses often operate on mismatched schedules.

Background: In most houses, the process for starting a shower in the morning is as follows: If your shower has separate hot & cold taps: turn the hot tap on first, and wait for the water to get hot.

Background: In the early 1800s, somewhat before the invention of the Xerox machine and the iPhone camera, the only way to copy a document was to actually write it twice.

Background: Modern households have many “always on” appliances that generate waste heat.

The Issue: Video meetings can be long and boring, and it’s easy for a participant to drift off while a presenter rambles.

Background: English lacks sufficiently granular terms for describing the level of friendship between two people: the primary options are just “friend” and “acquaintance.”

Background: Sometimes, people make references (“literary allusions,” if you prefer) to well-known books, movies, or other shared cultural elements.

Background: Apparently there exists a rarely-celebrated “Darwin Day” holiday on February 12 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Day).