They stole my invention.

It's happened to all of us. You're innocently watching TV, walking past a shop, or reading the paper, when you notice something that looks really cool. It does the thing that you have always wanted to do, in the best possible way. This is fantastic for the world, fantastic for everyone! Hooray!

And yet it's not fantastic for quite everyone, is it? Because you have been storing this vision - now inexplicably made flesh - inside the 'to be invented' sector of your brain ever since you were twelve. Just planning, sequestering it away essentially. You were sitting on a gold mine, to be opened up when you had a lazy couple of grand to swing the plan into action.

And now Fischer and Paykel, or Sony, or whichever upstart you care to name, has gone and somehow excavated your brain contents when you were sleeping and fed the output into their Inventomatic-3000. Because here it is. Your invention. Your Golden Ticket to the nerdy version of Euro Disney.

This happened to me last week when walking through Myer's electronics department. I was looking for something I didn't need, when I was confronted with something I needed even less: I had to have it. But it was...

A Risotto Machine.

No, hear me out. [Guards: cover all exits and bolt doors]. The risotto machine that I invented when I was about 16 consisted of a paddle-type contraption that was designed to constantly stir the rice, evenly and thoroughly. Suspended above the rice was a drip-feed contraption that would gradually release the stock into the rice. Seeping, stirring. Seeping, stirring. So simple, yet so profound.

The Sunbeam Risotto maker - $99 decimal point ninety bloody five bucks - had all of these things. It's criminal and wrong. The company obviously had a complex network of spies in my high school quadrangle, listening to my every brilliant utterance.

I feel like the guy who invented the phone before Alexander Bell: Elisha Gray. After years of inventing, he went down to the patent office with his 'personal electrical dual-way voice communicator', or whatever he called his phone, one arvo.

Gray: 'I would like to patent my personal electrical dual-way voice communicator, please.'

Receptionist: 'Sorry, Mr. Gray, some guy patented one of those this morning.'

Gray: That's a jolly shame. Oh well, bye-bye!

Actually, that's not what he really said. This risotto's for you, Elisha!