Right Round....

While adding to my carbon footprint and throwing out random catalogues last night, I came across this item in an educational toy catalogue. You know the kind, filled with chemistry sets and Build Your Own Sistine Chapel kits, feeding on modern parents' deluded belief that every single plaything our children hold in their wee little hands influences their future higher educational and professional possibilities, appealing to us with their lack of trademarked characters and promised hours of brain-developing fun, until, we realize, we are the ones who will be helping mix the chemicals and construct the flying buttresses, so incomprehensible are the instructions, and suddenly that Sponge Bob Nintendo DS doesn't seem like a bad choice after all. But I digress...

The item pictured above, The Mighty Rock Tumbler, is not new. In fact, my sister and I were the lucky recipients of one of these babies one mid-eighties Christmas. There was much ooh-ing and aah-ing upon its opening, and as with most educational toys, it was promptly put away to be used later, yet another benefit of these complicated, educational toys - the total lack of instant gratification. If you read the fine print of the exceprt above, you will see, once we were actually allowed to use this marvel, gratification was still three weeks away. Three minutes seems like an eternity when you're seven. Three weeks? Baby Smurf could grow up in that time!

K and I were convinced to overcome our impatience with the enticing wording on the package - "Make your own jewelry!"..."Hidden riches!" We were sure our fortune would be made with a few spins of The Tumbler, so we loaded ours up with the unimpressive rocks that were surely diamonds in the rough, water, and some gritty polishing sand, plugged 'er in and waited. And waited. And waited. Twenty one days never seemed so long. Night after night we checked our cylindrical gold mine that sounded much like a jack hammer working a few blocks away. If we couldn't stand the waiting, I have no idea how my parents stood the noise.

The day finally arrived and, being careful not to get my new neon-orange sweatshirt dirty, I opened The Tumbler, with K at my side, ready to bask in the glimmer of valuable semi-precious gems. And what was inside? Rocks. Definitely much rounder ones, but still rocks, swimming in the filthy sludge that had been created from the polishing sand and ground off bits of rock. We felt like Ralphie using his decoder ring in A Christmas Story.

So the moral of this story? Even educational toys can wind up being useless pieces of plastic crap taking up space in your playroom. With the added bonus of costing twice as much and, therefore, making you feel twice the sucker.