This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Commentary, Feelings, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I went to Fry’s Electronics tonight with my daughters. It’s Gina’s night out and I figured this would be a good bonding experience for us. As always, I needed a couple of things anyway and, I thought, how bad could it be? Ha. What the heck was I thinking?
Unfortunately, I didn’t take my camera on this little adventure, but in retrospect I probably protected the guilty and saved myself from a bunch of evidence for my daughters to use against me later in life. So, before I begin, here’s what I learned within five minutes of entering Fry’s Electronics:
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Fry’s sells stuffed animals. A lot of stuffed animals. Two and three year old girls want to touch stuffed animals. They want to touch every stuffed animal.
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A lot of today’s electronics are branded for children. For example, did you know that Dance Dance Revolution comes in both a Strawberry Shortcake and a Mickey Mouse version? No, neither did I, and it does.
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This store has a theme - it’s an Egyption theme that I’ve only sorta noticed in the past. I noticed a lot more tonight after walkingto the back of the store and finding that eight tables are perched on the back of 48 jaguars. That is six per child. Said children, taking advantage of their father, wanted information about the jaguars, e.g. are they boys or girls? What are their names? What are they doing? Of course, that’s times 48 and times 2, because apparently neither of my children have learned to listen to the answer of any question that they didn’t personally ask.
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Electronics, when placed optimally for geeks, are spread from the top of the shelf to the bottom. Often stacked and often on hooks. Children enjoy pulling things off pegs and stacking them up on the floor - in the middle of the aisle - and trying to put things that are normally meant to be stacked on the pegs in the wall by throwing them from the middle of the aformentioned aisle.
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At checkout, all candy is placed at eye level… for a toddler. There is a lot of candy at Fry’s. A lot of candy. More candy then you can even imagine.
So that was how our evening at Fry’s went. It was a long time, a lot of laughs (from me and those around me laughing at my efforts), and I’m glad that we got that bonding experience. Perhaps what made it all worthwhile was getting home to find my mother-in-law, Babi, there to help and hearing my older daughter tell her “we went to Fry’s and it was fun.” That made it all worth any amount of pain, frustration, or exasperation… but I probably won’t do it again.
Papa
