In these lovely 2.0 times, there are lots of tools that are useful for people looking to buy a house. Google Earth is one of them. You can view a satellite image of the home you are interested in, zoom in, look at the garden, see if there are any factories nearby with strange brown smoke coming from their chimneys.
It happens to also be true that you can use Google Earth to determine the annoyance levels of a particular neighbourhood, if you happen to find children bouncing up and down on giant trampolines all day annoying. It’s not so much the bouncing as the constant screaming that seems to have to accompany said bouncing. It seems to be impossible for a kid to use a trampoline without shrieking at the top of it’s lungs.
My proposal is to create a website that uses Google Earth to generate a Trampoline Index for residential areas in the UK. It would initially involve someone having to count all the blue circles, carefully filtering for paddling pools and ponds, but I foresee this becoming a kind of therapeutic hobby for people with irritating neighbours. However it might be possible to eventually automate the process. Then you could type in a postcode and get the Trampoline Index for that particular area.
Eventually this would start having an effect on house prices, and people would start burning their trampolines. They’d probably take the children off them first but you can’t have everything.
The Trampoline Index could ultimately be expanded to include the Overgrown Conifer Index, Old Man who Wanders about Naked in the Garden Index and Possibility of Someone Getting Funny about Parking Spaces Forecast.
I’m offering 90% of my business in return for £3.50 to buy a Bounty ice cream and some space raiders.
