4th of November: It's nearly Christmas!

Now, as most of you know, I work at a toy store. Ordinarily, people go "OMG cool" or "it must be so fun to work there".  No.  Think about it.  There's fun stuff freakin' everywhere, and you can't play with it, you have to get as much of it out of the store as possible.  That being said, it's still more fun than wherever you work.

Since it's approaching Christmas, we put out our 45 page catalogue yesterday.  It's not even the Christmas one.  It's like the pre-Christmas one, and its 45 pages.  It ends on November 16th.  What a waste of paper.  If it lasted to DECEMBER 16th, then yeah, that could work.  It probably takes until December to go through the whole bloody thing.  Anyway.  The topic of today's post is "Stupid shit that parents buy for their children".

I started thinking about this last night, when I was doing night fill.  Night fill is when a pallet of boxes, stacked higher than your head, is dumped in an aisle, and its your job to get them on the shelves.  If they don't go ON the shelves, you stick them on top. In stacks that, once again, go much higher than your head even if you're on the top of a 12ft ladder.  Yeah, I was doing night fill last night, in our Fisher Price/ Bruin aisle.

One of the items you typically find in the Bruin/Fisher Price aisle

It's all items made for kids from the ages of 6 months, to maybe about 3 or 4 years.  Playmats, rattles, activity walkers, that sort of thing.  It's not a bad aisle.  The boxes aren't too heavy, not too small that millions of things can fit in one box and you unleash hell when you open it.  The boxes are still quite big, and mostly square/rectangle.  They go on the shelf easily (yes, this is how toy store employees judge whether or not they like a toy).

Anyway, this aisle occasionally has some really stupid shit on sale.
Like a plane.

Technically, it's a Bruin Light and Sound Jet Ride On.  Who the fuck buys their kid a ride-on plane?  If your kids runs up to you saying "Mummy!  I want a plane for Christmas!"  You tell them to piss off and ask for something more realistic, like a job in a sweat shop.

I see no problem with my 3 year old being here

The plane is pretty cool though.  You can't see it in the picture, since it's in motion, but the rotor thingo at the front lights up and spins and makes noises and shit.  And it plays music and stuff.  Pretty cool.  I'd buy it, if it weren't made for people 50kg lighter than me.  And if I made more money.  And if it wasn't such a stupid thing to give a child.  I mean, if you give them a ride on jet one Christmas, what will they ask for next?  How do you top that? Give them omnipotency?

See, if I had a kid, and they wanted a plane for Christmas, I'd tell them that all their hopes and dreams are stupid, but I'll get them the next best thing.  A letter box.

 It talks!  And it sings, and it counts to ten.  At that point, I lost interest in what it did, because its a freaking letter box.  I really doubt that it can do anything cool.  Now really, toy manufacturers, a letter box?  What sort of messed up child do you think is going to WANT a letter box for Christmas?  Oh, that's right.  Toy manufacturers don't make toys for KIDS, they make it for the lazy-ass parents who can't be fucked finding what their kid wants.

I almost see where Fisher Price is coming from with the letter box.  Its bright, it has heaps of shit to pull on.  It sings, it counts, it has plenty of detatchable parts to choke on.  But I think the main part of its appeal is that fact that children go through a certain stage in psychological development (can't remember when, or what it's called.  What?  Don't ask me, I'm a psych student) where they find that putting stuff inside other stuff is really interesting.  They think that if they can't see it, its not there.  That's why they lose their shit in a game of peek-a-boo.  Just when they thought they got rid of you, you're fucking back again.  But I think that the letter box is aiming for that age group where boxes and closing doors and stuff are a novelty.  Who knows?  I may be wrong.  If I am, then it's just a letter box, being sold for the hell of it.


Now, another toy I don't get is Zhu Zhu Pets.  They're guinea pigs, which buttons on their noses, and wheels or some shit where their feet should be.

There's about a million varieties, even green ones.  I don't know why there's green ones.  But they sell for like $20 each.  An actual living guinea pig is about $10.  And if it were a real guinea pig, your child would not want more and more and more.  They would be content with the one they have.  Or, if you buy them a second one, they can be content with the millions of baby guinea pigs they will soon have.  But buying them a toy guinea pig is strange.  I think you're supposed to buy them a track and a play set so they can roll around the track or something.  I don't know, I've never seen it in action.  I have seen a note saying "do not place near head or hair" attached to a box.  I found that interesting.  I'd like to think that out there somewhere, a poor little kid had to cut a toy guinea pig out of their hair.

These Zhu Zhu Pets are a nightmare though. They have a fairly small designated area on the shelf, and you can fit millions on there because the boxes are so small.  But even with millions on the shelves, there's still millions more that need to go somewhere.  So they go on top of the shelves.  They spread lie a disease, even spilling across to overstocks in other aisles. It's ridiculous.  Also, they have now made a version for boys.  Kung Zhu Ninjas, and Special Forces Hamsters.  WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY


I'm running out of the will to type, so I'll talk about one more toy before I either move on to something else, or I give up entirely.

These are Sing-a-ma-jigs.
I don't really know what they're supposed to do, but I think they're supposed to be very popular this Christmas.  We have heaps of them in the warehouse.  I played with one.  They sound pretty weird.  I can't even explain them, but you can change the tone and pitch of their voices and god knows what else they do.  Their mouths consist of those really low quality hair bands I used to use when I was little.

I just looked on youtube for them.
This is what I found.

I think the creepiest part is that they have teeth.  Quite sharp, pain-causing teeth.  You can't see it, but behind the mouth are two little white plastic teeth that you don't notice until it closes around your finger.  And it hurts like a bitch.

Now, on to some less freaky topics to fill my word count, and update you on my daily life.

-Just as I stopped typing to give myself a bit of a break, I noticed that the palm leaf with the bird nest in it has fallen into the pool.  When you have a look, the spawn of satan baby bird  isn't in there.  Strange.  Mum thinks the dog ate it.  I don't think he would, but who knows?  It had to go somewhere.

-Last night after I got home from work, the BF came over to pick up his wallet, and to discuss a plan I had come up with while I was putting ride-on Jets on shelves all night.  I was thinking that in January, if we're still together, it will be our 1 year anniversary (holy shit that year went fast).  I suggested we plan to do something romantic awesome.  Like hire out a hotel room and chill out for a day or two.  By January, he should have a steady job and some money, and I'll be drowning in cash because of Christmas.    And it's not even that expensive, like I expected it to be, if you take into consideration how nice the place is.  We would have to have a balcony overlooking the Strand, obviously.  That view alone is worth the price.  Look at it!

I'll make sure I bring my white dress, so I can look in amazement in the opposite direction of the beach like this chick.

Nothing's set in stone, since I only came up with it last night.  But now I really want to do it.  I mean, even if we break up, I'll get a few friends to take his place, and we have a wild weekend in town.  Sounds good to me (the BF, on the other hand, suspects that I want to steal his kidneys).

Partly, I want to do it because it's an awesome idea, and I'll need a break after Christmas.  But the main reason is because I'm 18, and I want to use my 18-ness to do things I couldn't do before, like buy alcohol, and book hotel rooms without parental permission. I've been 18 for like 3 months now, and I still feel like I shouldn't be in 18+ places, doing 18+ things.  The novelty probably won't wear off for a while.

-Today is the second day of almost constant rain.  It's supposed to be Summer here, or at least approaching Summer, yet it's freezing cold because of the rain and overcast weather.  I'm actually considering putting on a jumper (sweater for you Americans)! The downside to rainy Summer weather in this part of Australia is the fact that we get cyclones.  It's really hot and humid (sticky and damp like a sauna), and the cyclone develops, and it destroys everything.  Fucking sucks man.  This Summer is supposed to be a really busy cyclone season, unfortunately for us humans.  Cyclones only come into contact with towns pretty rarely, but when they do, they fuck shit up.  A few years back, cyclone Larry hit a town near where I live, and all of Australia had a banana drought.  That sounds weird, but we had no bananas.  That's weirder than the term "banana drought".

Right.  I've made the minimum word count for today.  Now I just have to make up for yesterday's failure.  To do this, I shall talk about how screwed up the NaNoWriMo word count statistics are.  They're very discouraging.  Last year, when I attempted it (and failed about 2 days in, after 2000 words) they had a very basic statistics screen.  It said your goal, how many words you did today, and your total word count.  Now it's all about how many "successful" days you've had, how many days in a row, all that sort of stuff.  Even if you do a massive word count one day, then a slightly smaller than average one the next day, you're still ahead, but the website counts that as unsuccessful.   It was doing it to me yesterday.  I did about 3000 words one day, then 1240 the next, and even though I was below my daily goal, I was still good for the total goal, yet I was "unsuccessful", apparently.   It really sucks for the people who have school and stuff, who do the 10,000k weekends.  Because the website says they have 5 day "unsuccessful streaks".  That's really very discouraging for people, especially if they're actually ahead of their goal.


I just had a look at yesterday’s word count, and realised I have to do another 700 words or so to make up for yesterday, if I want to hit my total goal of 9000 words by today.  How about I do some study, and I'll type a small-ish blog later this afternoon/tonight. 

My total so far is 8415.