An Explosive Christmas

I love Christmas. I always have. I love it even more now that I have children of my own. Earlier this month, as I eagerly anticipated Christmas Day and envisioned all the wonderful activities and experiences I would share with my kids, one thing, above all else, never entered my mind. Bomb disposal. But, that’s exactly what I ended up doing on Christmas morning this year. Go figure.

My boys love flashlights. They love to pretend to be deep-sea divers and cave explores and police officers, and anything else you might do with a flashlight. Thank goodness they don’t know what a proctologist is! Anyway, as with any other toy or object found in our house, when they decide to stop playing with a flashlight, they simply abandon it wherever they happen to be. There is never a thought of returning it to its designated storage spot and certainly never a thought about turning it off. That’s why they never get to play with my flashlights. I like to know where mine are, and I like them to work when I pick them up.

Since I am the cold-hearted father figure, I am content with simply telling them, “No, you may not play with my flashlight.” Their grandma, however, is a softy, and wants them to be cave explorers or deep-sea divers or doctors with a strange specialty someday, so she buys them flashlights. As a result, we have approximately twenty to thirty small, cheap, plastic or aluminum flashlights hidden throughout the house, all with dead batteries. She buys them on sale at clothing stores, or at the dollar stores, so they are never a brand that can be found at any reputable hardware store or home improvement warehouse. What I’m trying to say is that they’re cheap. Inexpensive, and also cheaply made. That used to seem like a good idea, given the boys’ propensity for mistreating them. Not anymore.

This Christmas morning, lo and behold amidst the ripping and shredding of wrapping paper and boxes, all three boys received new cheap plastic flashlights from Grandma. We like to keep approximately half of our family’s total net worth in the form of batteries stored in our laundry room, so we had those babies powered up in no time. Son Number One, being the oldest of the three, got the biggest flashlight. His was the jumbo model that took two D-size batteries. (Insert your own proctology joke here). All three flashlights were the new blindingly bright LED models, and our house was suddenly lit up like an auto mall on Memorial Day weekend. Three minutes later, we were knee-deep in Legos, and all three flashlights were abandoned under couches or behind desks, all still turned on, draining the batteries. I miss having spending money.

After all the gifts had been unwrapped, the boys set about to playing with all their newfound treasures. Son Number One retrieved his new flashlight from under the couch and ended up playing with it for quite some time. He brought it to me after a while, complaining that it was coming apart. It was a twist on/off model, and he had been twisting the lens end enough that he had accidentally screwed it all the way off. I gathered up all the parts and screwed it all back together. Since it took me longer than two and a half seconds to fix, he had lost interest during the repair process and had moved on to something else by the time I had it back in one piece. Not bothering to call him back into the room, I just set the flashlight on the kitchen counter and got back to my duties as official Christmas cookie tester.

I was still in the kitchen five minutes later when Number One came back in to get his flashlight. He reached up to grab it, and immediately dropped it back onto the counter. “Ouch!” he said, “my flashlight is really hot!”

I set my plate of cookies down and picked up the flashlight. I, too, had to drop it back onto the counter. He wasn’t kidding. The plastic case was too hot to hold onto. Hmmm. That can’t be good.

I very calmly screamed for everyone to hit the floor and roll or crawl out of the kitchen, or as I am told I referred to it at the time, “the blast radius.” I dove across the counter and retrieved the barbeque tongs from one of the drawers, and gingerly picking up the incendiary device, made my way as smoothly and quickly as possible to the “bomb containment bunker,” or as we normally refer to it, the garage.

So there I am: Christmas morning, in my pajama pants and slippers, wearing my brand new Cal Poly sweatshirt I just received from Santa, stylishly accessorizing it with wrap-around safety glasses and boar hide gauntlet-style welding gloves, standing at my garage workbench diffusing a bomb made out of cheap foreign circuit boards and two large Duracell® batteries going supernova. You just never know what life’s going to throw at you.

I was able to get the impromptu pipe bomb apart and shake the D-cells out in time, but it was close. They were so hot they had started to expand, and they almost didn’t slide out of the plastic tube. Thankfully, getting the batteries out diffused the short-circuited flashlight and avoided a really ugly, smelly, and strange Christmas Day incident.

With a regular flashlight that has a standard bulb, there isn’t too much that can go wrong. Apparently, however, with the new LED flashlights, since they require internal circuit boards to work, if those circuit boards and assembly techniques get cheap enough, and just the right circuit board parts fail, they can create a situation where the flashlight becomes a space heater instead. A really inconvenient, unpredictable, flaming space heater.

This time of year, many people tend to get wrapped up in looking for the true meaning of Christmas, getting mired down with the inequities of life around the country or around the world, feeling guilty for their own good fortune or envious of others.

I say, don’t overthink it. Keep it simple, and always be thankful for what you have. Sometimes, the Christmas miracle is simply that the cheap LED flashlight didn’t burn your house to the ground.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Batteries are Draining Me

If you have kids in the house, then somewhere in that house you no doubt run a small side business warehousing batteries. Depending on how many kids and toys you have, you may actually own more batteries than some third-world countries. I know for a fact that I own more AAs than Bangladesh.

In the good old days of my youth, my toys took only one size battery. The 9-Volt. It had opposite terminals on top and you had to plug it into the vinyl-coated contacts at the end of two thin red and white wires stuffed into the battery compartment of your walkie-talkie or radio-controlled race car. When you took the old battery out it was always a gamble on whether you would rip those wires right out of the toy, because the used 9-Volt always managed to weld itself to the contacts. You could check to make sure the old battery was really dead by putting the contacts on your tongue. Everyone who has ever done it remembers vividly the first time they put a brand new 9-Volt on their tongue. The cattle prod-like shock across your taste buds and the lingering metallic flavor is unforgettable. Good times!

There were only two other sizes of battery besides the 9-Volt in my youth. The D-cell, which went in standard flashlights, and the gigantic, slightly smaller than a brick, ”lantern battery” with the two cone-shaped spiral spring contacts on top. They went in the molded plastic flashlight with the seven-inch-diameter lens and integral suitcase handle that every family had for camping or emergencies. It was six volts instead of nine, but no one ever thought about putting that one on their tongue! They always seemed to last for a sum total of 8-1/2 minutes in the 300-pound flashlight before it would begin to get dimmer and dimmer. At that point your parents or grandparents would let you turn it on and keep it on so you could stare at the faint glow from the bulb as long as you could to try to pinpoint the exact second that the battery went completely dead. Who needs a Playstation?

I rarely see the 9-Volt or the 18-pound brick nowadays. They have been replaced by approximately eighty-seven other models, shapes and voltages. The clear winner is the AA, which seems to have held the top spot for a long time now. I remember as a bachelor being indignant when I got my fist TV remote that took AAAs. “Why do I need these? The AAs works just fine! Now I have to stock two kinds of small batteries.” Little did I know, that was only the beginning. I got married, had kids, and somewhere along the line, someone brought 13 tons of toys into my home. With the exception of one old-timer wooden train, each and every toy requires batteries. Our portable plastic baby fence takes batteries. We have a wooden puzzle that takes batteries. We have stuffed animals, cribs and bikes that take batteries. And we have books that take batteries. Now come on! The last thing in the world that is supposed to require batteries is a book.

The manufacturers of the battery-operated books and some of the other toys have taken things one step further. In a creepy effort to make their products popular, or at least seem popular, the toys will actually try to get the kid’s attention back if they stop playing with them. When you put them down or stop turning pages for a minute, they call out to the child “Turn the page to hear more” or “Elmo’s lonely, play with me.” Why don’t they just be honest and have the toy say “Excuse me son, sales are down in North America. We would like this product to hold your interest for another three-tenths of a second so your mommy will distinguish it as being special and purchase one for your cousin.”

Until recently, my wife and I had a nice run where we were only stocking AAs, AAAs, C-cells, D-cells, and the occasional 9-Volt. Granted, we have to buy AAs and C's by the pallet pretty much weekly, but at least we only had to inventory five different kinds. That has all changed now. My sons just got their first set of walkie-talkies. Did their super-cool new Transformers Walkie-Talkie set come with 9-Volts like mine did when I was their age? No. They came with calculator batteries. You know the kind. They go in your car’s keychain remote. They look like a dime or a nickel. And they are from Hell.

When you go to the regular battery section at the store it is a straightforward affair. Need AAs, there they are. When you go to the calculator battery section of the store you had better bring some water and a snack, because you’re going to be there for a while. For reasons known only to the battery company engineers, they felt the need to designate them with a letter and a number. C124 or A534. Probably because there are only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, and they anticipated a need for at least three thousand unique sizes. Besides having an almost infinite amount of diameter and thickness combinations, they have cross-references between the model numbers printed in microscopic writing on the packages. It’s like a fun little treasure hunt where you have to find one dime in a pile of two hundred dimes. The D435 is compatible with the A534, the F129, as well as the H245, but not the D534 or the F534.

Just in case it was too simple, the battery companies’ marketing teams went ahead and designated some of them as “medical” and put the universal Red Cross symbol on the package. If I need an H432 for my kid’s toy, and it comes in “medical” and plain, which should I choose? Will the “medical” one last longer, or will it immediately recognize that it is not powering a Life-Alert necklace, and fail to work at all?

The good news is that the calculator batteries come in packs of one, and they cost $9.78 each on average. Our new walkie-talkie set takes four per unit, so if my math is correct, when the batteries run out in both units it should only cost me $3240.87 and six hours of my time cross-referencing in the battery aisle. That is sooooo much better than the forty cents and two minutes it would have taken me if they were AAs.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go put the folks from Mattel and Duracell on my Christmas card list.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2008 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of “My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh,” Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!