Getting their own back

I’m a parent. I know that feeling of wanting revenge. Sometimes on your children. Sometimes on the world for the hell it’s putting you through. But parenting is a gift, a blessing and a joy. You’re not supposed to need revenge for that so, whatever form your vengeance takes, it has to be subtle and within the guidelines. If you can’t take it out on your kids by “helping out” at the school disco or uploading baby bath time photos to social media, you could get perverse satisfaction by making sure other parents suffer as you have done by designing diabolical toys. It started with those plastic lawnmowers with the clicking noise and the little bouncing plastic balls but, my, how technology has changed:

Minecraft. It started so well. It was like Lego without the puncture marks in the soles of your feet. The kids could imagine, build, destroy and build again. It had everything – without the mess. Then they introduced multi-player – the miserable bastards. Now I don’t have a problem with cyber bullying at my house, just cyber bickering. “He put lava in my house!” “He knocked down my walls!” “He stole my iron! Dad! He won’t give it back!” If it was Lego, I would just confiscate the disputed piece. Now I can’t even see them, nor is there any evidence of the crime. I’m a twenty-first century parent; I’m entitled to use electronic devices as baby-sitters. I don’t need them turned into yet another field on which I have to referee.

Baby aquarium. It’s a little toy that straps on to the end of the cot. It has an amount of water in it, between two plates of Perspex, some bubbles, and some fish that move up and down in time to the music. It features a large and attractive button on the front to allow my son to develop his motor skills by turning it on and off - and an effective battery life of just over 17 minutes.  After that, the fish bob happily, the little bubbles percolate merrily away while the music dies a long and lingering death. The default setting is Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The bride walks happily down the aisle for the first 17 minutes, after which the effects of the free drinks start to take their toll on the string quartet and the phrases start to slur a little. Another half hour later and the only the cellist is left upright, with the first violin making heroic attempts from her prone position while the other two have given up entirely and are dribbling on their tuxedos.  And he can turn it back on any time he likes.

And, on that subject, I condemn to eternal reinfection by Snapdo, the person that decided to include a little screw on battery covers. As if finding C-size batteries at 6pm on a rainy public holiday wasn’t hard enough!

Fast food toys.  Someone, somewhere is taking a sadistic glee in the eternal cycle of anticipation and disappointment that is fast food and the free toys you get with kids meals. You crave it. The kids crave it. “Can we have … and make sure I get a toy!” Because I’m stupid and human and condemned to eternal hopefulness, I buy the stuff and make sure I get the boy toy, not the girly one. “What does it do dad?” I examine the thing and study the three picture instruction manual and my response to his enthusiastic anticipation has to be “The arm moves if you press this button.” Well, cancel Santa, we don’t need anything else this year, we’ve got a Smurf whose arm moves when you press the button. So it follows everything else into the bin. I sure hope the person whose job it is to design and make these things is getting their job satisfaction from sadism because if they went into toy design to make kids happy, they are living an empty and meaningless existence.