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Have you - or do you know of someone who has - built up a ball of rubber bands, baseball-size, big enough to bounce solidly between cubicles or down the hall?

Fun? Yes. Functional?

Are simple lowbrow latex rubber bands, patented in 1845, and the inevitable rubber band balls really examples of technology and innovation?

Technology? Yes, if you use the broad definition of technology as "reproducible capabilities, whether these capabilities are embodied in procedures or equipment," put forward by tech-innovation scholar Paul Adler. If procedures and equipment count, googling "rubber bands" gets back a glut of rubber band Gatlin guns.

Innovation? Anthropologists speculate the inventors of the first rubber balls, the Mayans, used the balls as more durable replacements for sacrificed heads in their blood sport resembling soccer. We all vote for that improvement.

Albeit an uncommon understanding, the rubber band is a technology, as are many of the things we use daily and regard as everything but technologies. We can take our technologies too seriously or, in this case, maybe not seriously enough.

Beyond their high jinx, I recently concluded that rubber band balls are worthy innovations in rubber band storage and delivery.

In the past, whenever I saw balls of bands on desks I would think they were wasteful. Does someone really need so many? (Answer: You get that many. At Staples, a one-pound box goes for $6 and contains as many as 2,500 rubber bands - enough for several large balls.)

I generally concluded the ball-builders, while industrious, had too much time on their hands, or maybe were just semi-athletic office pranksters.

(If you seek the record rubber band ball size - get a forklift - yours will weigh more than 3,130 pounds and contain more than 851,000 bands.)

Arguably, building rubber band balls can be therapeutic in a Dilbert office-break squeeze-ball way. Next break, take a box of rubber bands and calm yourself.

Thinking about it further, there is a loopy efficiency in a rubber band ball. In the organized desk view, the ball keeps the elastic bands from getting tangled up in a box or drawer, yet handy to find and easily accessible. No muss, no fuss - a brilliant solution.

Many of us, on the other superior hand, end up cursing our pen-entangled jangle of paper clips-mixed rubber bands bird-nested in the corner of our drawers every time we try to find and extract one the needed size.

Frankly, until I wrote this, I hadn't given the builders of rubber band balls any practical credit. In a flash, the notion of the rubber band ball went from the absurd to the clever.

Why don't companies sell balls of bands? They are easier for you, the customer, to manage, and come with free fun.

Indeed, not all innovation has been stretched out of the rubber band.

Adrian Chernoff - an Albuquerque native (now Michiganian), University of New Mexico MBA graduate and General Motors uber-future-hydrogen-skateboard-car designer - proved that snap is left in the pedestrian rubber band with his entry in the Staples Invention Quest competition last year.

His invention, scrawled out on a shuttle ride to Boulder from Denver International, comes with an extended rubber tab molded on the band that allows the user to write on the tab to easily identify the banded contents.

Chernoff, one of 10 finalists among more than 8,300 entries, won $5,000, a new patent, and a license from Staples with his new rubber band - now branded as Staples Rubber Bandits, $2.99 for 12.

At that rate, a box of 2,500 Staples Bandits goes for $622.92, or 100 times more than the regular box.

Innovation happens whenever we see things in new ways, and sometimes we get rewarded for our stretch.

One of my favorite quotes, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, is fitting here: "Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension."