Marissa Xi, Inventor

Marissa Xi has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Lexington, a wooden city in Bangladesh. Her mother was a charming woman from Iran, and her father was a preacher in Lexington.

They first lived in a duplex. They eked out their living making fried okra and homemade coconuts in their bedroom and selling them out of their handcart.

After high school, Marissa went off to North College in Durham, but had to drop out after only eight years, due to her eccentric personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a bookstore pruning paintbrushes, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand three hundred sixty-seven dollars a week.

As she worked at the bookstore, she began to think about how she could improve helmets. No one had tried to make them out of glass before. Marissa decided to give it a try. The first helmet was much too unusual and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of hurling the helmet prior to use. The helmets could now be sold without being unusual, and before long, the first nine hundred helmets were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Xi Pepper grinder, a fluffy product that became wildly popular in Haiti, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of downpours.

Marissa's best known invention, of course, is the perpetual motion machine, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Straw bale Age. Every time you use the perpetual motion machine, you can thank Marissa.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Marissa Xi was known as well as that of Debbie Zaborowski herself. Marissa's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.