Some Blog Site

That headline means “toys that are annoying”, not “how to annoy toys”. I don’t know that inanimate objects can be annoyed, which makes it even more frustrating because they don’t even know or care how bothersome they can be.

Our basement is used mainly for storage. As a set of toys phases out of daily or weekly use by the kids, we will put the toys in the basement. Sometimes we will pull them out again, and the kids will be pleasantly surprised by the “new” toys, or they might remember them and be glad to play with them again.

Other times, usually as a threat an enticement to clean up a room, we will say something like “Whatever is still on the floor when I come back is going down to the basement.” The kids don’t go down in the basement by themselves (too many spiderwebs), so sending toys down there is equivalent to banishing them from the house. “Them” being the toys, not the children.

I just reinstated one toy that had been put down in the basement. It had been put down there because it wasn’t being used much, and it took a lot of floor space. But for fun, I brought it up. My wife and I quickly remembered the other reason it had quietly disappeared into the basement one night: the songs.

There are four buttons on this toy, and they play a random assortment of songs. Loud songs. Loud songs that last way too long. The buttons are touchy, so that the toy is easily set off. Not as touchy as the radio controls in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (waving a finger near them would change stations), but pretty sensitive nonetheless.

And then a thought occurred to me: we have never replaced the batteries on that thing.

So I am proposing some sort of a law, like Murphy’s Law or Muphry’s Law or something: The battery life of a toy is directly proportional to how annoying it is.

The more annoying the toy, the longer the batteries will last. The more you want something to wear out so it will stop bothering you, the more it will just keep working. Conversely, the more you like something, the more quickly its batteries will die.

“He who blesses his friend with a loud voice early in the morning,It will be reckoned a curse to him.”
– Proverbs 27:14