Bright Ideas...that someone else already thought of

At my last job, my department was in charge of product development of new candies/novelties. Oftentime after a great brainstorming session we would come up with a brilliant idea or perfect name for a product, only to discover with a quick google search or check of uspto.gov that someone else had thought of our novel idea first.  The same thing happens to me every now and then and at the risk of making myself out to be a complete idiot, I thought I'd share a few genius ideas I've had.

1. After receiving numerous emails from colleagues with the mentioned attachment missing, I thought, "Wouldn't it be brilliant if my email program could read my email, determine whether I was talking about an attachment, then if I clicked send, it would say, 'aren't you forgetting something?'" Turns out it WOULD be brilliant. And the people at CodeTwo thought it was too. I have downloaded the Attachment Reminder and used this on my Outlook ever since. Now I'm just waiting for the "you seem to be in an angry and/or overly tired state of mind. I suggest you have a cup of hot cocoa, get a good night's sleep, and see if you still want to post that facebook status in the morning" filter.
2. In a coffee-haze overworked state at work one time, I remember thinking to myself, "I don't want to STAPLE these papers together and I don't want to TAPE them. I just want them to kind of stay together for a while but I might want to separate them later."  Enter...the paperclip.
3. After a blurry-eyed carpal-tunnel-aggravating online shopping spree trying to find artwork for our house, I thought to myself, "Why isn't there a place where I can just go SEE all this stuff in person so I can see the colors and size better?" Oh yeah...that's called a store.

Have you ever thought of a terrific idea...second?