Things They Should Invent roundup

I've come up with quite a few inventions in the past few days:

1. Pagers for the doctor's office. You know how sometimes at mall restaurants they'll give you a pager and buzz you when a table is free? I'd like doctor's offices to do that when they're running late. The other day I spent a whole hour sitting in my doctor's waiting room, only a block away from my apartment. I would have been far less cranky if I could have spent that hour at home. I know they don't like to have the doctor waiting around in between patients, so they could page you when the person before you goes in, which should give you plenty of time to get back to the office.

2. The option to listen to someone's voicemail's outgoing message without ringing their phone. Sometimes I just want to know a business's hours, but I don't need or want to speak to anyone. So usually I wait until I can reasonably assume that they're closed, and then call them to listen to their outgoing voicemail. But that still leave my number on their call display, plus I might end up in the awkward situation of having someone answer - or, worse, having someone answer even if they're closed. Some voicemail systems allow you to leave a message without ringing the phone, so why not allow you to listen to the outgoing message without ringing the phone?

3. Automatic TV rerun scheduler. Suppose you've seen some, but not all, episodes of The Simpsons, or Seinfeld, or some other TV series with frequent reruns on many channels. Wouldn't it be cool if you could go to some central website, check off a checklist of episodes you have (or haven't) seen, and it would tell you when the episodes you haven't seen are going to air?

4. Tell me if household products are bad for bugs. I was considering switching floor cleaning products, so I asked a friend if she had ever used the product I was thinking of using. She said she had, but she switched away from it because she had read that it might be bad for her pets. Now I don't have any pets at the moment, so that isn't a problem for me. But if it's bad for household pets, is it also bad for bugs? I would love to use a floor cleaner that's poisonous to bugs! If I could make my home less inviting to bugs simply by switching cleaning products, bring it on! They have the science to determine whether products are bad for pets, so why not extend that to tell us if it's bad for bugs? They could even use that as a bonus in advertising, as long as they don't show pictures of bugs.