Yet another reason why I'll never be rich

My desk at work is at the far end of the office and mostly obscured by the other cube walls. With goaltending being pretty rough on my knees, I like to sit very low so that I can keep my knees bent when I'm sitting or easily straighten them out by slumping in my chair. This means that people can't see me until they get all the way to my desk. This annoys people.

Were I somebody else, I would default to one of these options:

1.) Deal with it.
2.) Increase the height of my chair and get a box on which to put my feet.

But since I'm not somebody else, I started using this sytem where I placed an index card on the wall behind me to indicate to others whether I'm at my desk, away from my desk, or at home. This was an intuitive, low-tech solution, but failed to address the laziness problem. See, cycling between three index cards requires that I pay attention to what I'm doing and remember to change the cards.

I don't.

So instead of a reliable indicator of my presence, the cards were serving as public reminders of my laziness. They were lying to my coworkers' faces.

The one thing I don't forget to do, courtesy of college roommates, is forget to lock my computer. So I started thinking about having my machine toggle a light on and off when the computer gets locked. Further analysis revealed that this would probably be a lot of work,* so instead I decided to build a light that I could actuate manually.

A little-known fact about my day-to-day interaction with objects is my liking for a good button. Elevators, street crossing signals, keyboards, and anything else with buttons stands to make me much happier with a good, responsive button. Toggle switches are particularly desirable because they've got a solid mechanical feel and a decidedly retro feel.

I go to Radioshack, buy two project boxes, a spool of wire, a package of 68 ohm resistors, a giant LED, a toggle switch, and a roll of solder. We have broken the $20 barrier to build a light. With a broken keyboard donating a usable USB cable, I set to work building the simplest circuit known to man. I can sheepishly admit that replacing a battery with a USB power source in this circuit required the repeated humiliating refactoring of my design as I found myself continually building a circuit whose sole function was to short circuit a USB port.

I swear, I am actually a fully degreed and educated engineer.

So now I have a complicated solution to a simple problem, and all I had to do was spend $20 and a half hour at Radioshack.

*The Googling required to find a piece of software that will turn a light on and off was feeling onerous.