More Batteries Please, Pass the screwdriver

Maybe it happened in a trailer park somewhere. On one of those days where the Tornado hadn’t run through the park. Maybe it was a nice day, and the trailer trash mom was screwing some sugar daddy in the back of the mobile home while her three kids from four dads sat out on the picnic table waiting for their home to stop rocking back and forth and their mom to stop screaming “yeah right there” from the back room of the mobile home. And maybe little Johnny was playing his brand new Mattel Electronic Football II, you know, the green one that had passing. The very game that Sugar Daddy had brought over to keep the kids busy while he “talked to Momma” for a few minutes.

And Johnny, being naturally curious, opened the battery compartment, to test the 9-V battery against his lips, the way he had seen momma check her batteries on her toys. And maybe Johnny didn’t quite know what he was doing, and he swallowed the battery. And an hour later, when Momma and Sugar Daddy finished their “Conversation,” they came out to find little Johnny as dead as dead can be.

And Momma decided to do the right thing, and sue Mattel for having an unsafe product; one that little Johnny was able to open and take the battery out and die. So Momma sued, and Mattel had to pay her Millions of dollars, which she promptly invested in a new motor home (The deluxe model), the Indian casino on the riverboat, cigarettes and Wild Turkey.

And Mattel and all the other toy manufacturers decided to put a little screw in the back of every one of their battery-operated products.

And now, every time one of my kids leaves their toys on overnight, or gets a new battery-operated toy, I have to rummage through draws to find the screwdriver, which turns out to be too thick to open the battery compartment on the toy anyway half the time.