About two years ago, we spent the summer at my sister's house out on Long Island. During the course of same, my kids became very attached to a toy that formerly belonged to my brother-in-law's kids; specifically Alphabert's Sonic Phonics. Essentially an interactive learning device, the toy featured two animatronic robots who speak, giggle, gesture and roll their eyes while conducting reading, recognition and pronunciation games. While it's a highly sophisticated game, rife with myriad eye-catching features, it's also somewhat boundlessly annoying. When not emitting a shrill series of digitized jingles, the two little robots are prone to exhort, chirp, coax, plead and unsolicitedly opine. Creepily, after doling out a series unheeded commands like "Press a Button," "Let's Jam," and "Try Again," the machine will actually switch into a sort of panic mode. "Hey, where'd you go? Let's keep playing!" Eventually, it will deduce that its target audience has toddled out of the room and will summarily shut down. It's truly an amazing toy. But, like I said, it's wicked annoying.
At the end of the summer, my sister and brother-in-law graciously offered to let us take the toy back to the city with us. Yeah, thanks a lot! Just what we needed. I should also point out that this is not the first time my sister has done this. In any case, the kids were thrilled, so Alphabert & his demonic purple sidekick joined us for the drive home. Hooray.
I'm not quite sure how or why, but Alphabert took up residence in our bedroom. I guess the intention was that we could ration out sessions with the high-volume toy that way, as opposed to letting the kids have it in their room (where'd they never cease playing with it). That may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in short order, both Charlotte & Oliver were routinely coming into our room in the early morning to fire up ol' Alphabert for rousing sessions of giddy headache-inducement. But what could I do? They loved it. I wasn't going to be the nasty Dad that took away their favorite toy.
Time passed. New playthings came and went, but Alphabert somehow never fell out of fashion. Oliver especially warmed to Alphabert's music function, tirelessly hitting the keyboard with his stubby little fingers to repeat one of any nine-dozen irritating ear-worms (imagine an infantile Kraftwerk playing electronic ditties like "The Farmer in the Dell," "Daisy," "Three Blind Mice" and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" in maddening perpetuity). Inevitably, Oliver would get up and scamper off, but Alphabert would continue his dedicated clarion call. "Where'd you go? Let's keep playing." Either Peggy or I would reach the end of our patience and hit the big red "off" button, or Alphabert would do the math and figure it out itself.
Very recently, however, there was a problem. The big red "off" button stopped working, and instead of turning itself off, Alphabert would start the cycle all over again. We didn't notice at first, but after it'd been going (and going and going and going) for over an hour this morning, even Charlotte commented on how annoying it was. I started stabbing at the "off" button, with no success. The two little robots glared it me, delivering little taunts and incongruous asides as I fumbled with their apparatus. I figured I'd just remove the batteries and that would be that. The problem there was that that task required a screwdriver. My nerves rattled, I sprinted to the closet to fetch one.
There's a pivotal scene in Stanley Kubrick's seminal sci-fi classic, "2001: A Space Odyssey" wherein intrepid astronaut David Bowman is forced to dismantle HAL 9000, the intelligent supercomputer (prone to speaking in a chillingly dispassionate voice) that has gone quietly berserk and taken control of his spaceship. As Bowman gingerly removes HAL's circuitry, the murderous machine regresses insanely, singing a disturbing rendition of "Daisy" (Daisy, Daisy/Give me your answer do/I'm half-crazy over the love of you...) before finally being shut down. In a disquietingly similar episode this morning, I finally managed to silence Alphabert after testily removing the four AA batteries from its candy-colored backside. It's now sitting dead-eyed and motionless on the dining room table. Charlotte and Oliver have been eyeing it dolefully, but at the moment, we have no intention of putting those batteries back in.
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