“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

– Victor Hugo

•••

Bang on, Victor. And its not always new ideas we need. Sometimes we need to take an old idea down to the riverbank and hold it under the water until it stops moving.

Airline tickets for instance. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to foist airline tickets on an unsuspecting world, but somewhere between the Wright boys mucking about at Kitty Hawk and the Concorde swooshing across the Atlantic, some airline nimrod decided that no one should be allowed aloft without a sheaf of paper composed of incomprehensible gibberish reproduced in quintuplicate clutched in his fist. 

Airline tickets – not a great idea. Too bulky to fit in your pocket and too flimsy to survive rough handling, airline tickets were the last word in pointless paperwork – unless you happened to lose yours.

I did, once. I got to the Air Canada ticket gate in Vancouver for a flight to Kelowna, fanned through my pockets for my ticket – gone, lost, disparu. I shrugged apologetically to the ticket agent and prepared to show my ID.

“That’ll be $90,” the ticket agent said.

For what? To reprint a piece of paper? Check your computer, I told the agent.  You’ll find my name on there.  How many Arthur Black’s you figure there are on flight AC 56 to Kelowna?

“Ninety dollars,” he said. “Cash or credit card. We don’t take cheques.”

This ugly scene played out perhaps 10 years ago in Vancouver airport. It would never happen today because, at some point in the last decade, someone had the bright idea to replace those dopey wads of paper with E tickets. It not only removed a source of migraines for travellers, it saved the airlines a bundle of dough. 

The International Air Transport Association estimates it took about $10 to process an old-fashioned paper airline ticket. Cost of processing an E ticket: about a buck. Savings to the industry: U.S. $3 billion a year. 

No brainer.

Here’s another no brainer – hospital gowns.

Of all the humiliations you will endure during your next hospital visit for a checkup – the jabbings, the pokings, the proddings and probings, none will resonate quite as terrifyingly as the dumbass gown they will hand you to put on. The adjective is apt.

You know the gown I mean. “Take off all your clothes and slip into this,” the nurse will smirk. It goes on like an apron, with ties at the neck and the waist. 

Here’s a news flash for the gown designers: All guys – in fact, most people this side of Martha Stewart – are extremely ham-handed when it comes to blindly tying reef knots behind their back.

And besides, no matter how deftly you tie the knot of a hospital gown, it still leaves most of your caboose hanging out in the breeze.

Whose bright idea was that?

No doctor I have ever questioned could satisfactorily explain the bizarre and composure-rattling construction of this garment. “They’ve always been like that,” is the usual rationalization.

Yeah, well they’re not anymore. 

Some genius, working for the firm MIP Inc in Montreal, has come up with a replacement they call the “respectful” gown.  It’s opaque and wraps around the body to cover the backside and tie at the (well, duh!) front of the body, rather than at the back.

Which means the patient is not involuntarily mooning everybody standing astern.

The re-jigged hospital gown isn’t just patient-friendly, it’s a boon to hospital budgets as well. Because they’re made of microfibre, the new gowns wash easier, dry quicker, last longer and look better. 

A study conducted at five Quebec hospitals which use the new gowns shows an annual saving of $118,000 just from not having the fold the 9,000 new gowns each time they’re washed.

Are the new gowns at your hospital yet? Probably not, but they’re on the way. It’s just as Victor Hugo said – you can’t stop an idea whose time has come.

If Fate should take you to the hospital for a checkup before the new gowns arrive, try to keep your back to the wall. And for God’s sake don’t bend over to adjust your paper slippers.

Arthur Black is a syndicated humour columnist.