Before I had an 8-year-old son of my own, I thought Pokémon was old school. I remember the little boys I babysat for in high school played it. The low-definition graphics and apparent stupidity of the whole thing led me to believe its popularity would not last long. But 20-something years later, here we are.
My child is obsessed with Pokémon. He has millions of cards, action figures, tv-show recordings, books, and, yes, video games. I previously supported his habit as it encouraged his reading. He couldn’t sit still for the first five minutes of gym class (as was reflected on his report card), but he could occupy himself for 60 minutes with a Pokémon book. I got past the back cover being the front cover and how the book is actually read back-to-front all for the sake of his education.
Several weeks of anticipation led up to this past weekend. It was the big release of Pokémon Black and White. He had me research the closest video game store and find out what time it opened. So there we were at the mall at 11 a.m. Sunday morning (God’s name was invoked several times, though probably not in the same way most of the other people were using it that morning). I’m pretty sure the guys at the store thought we were crazy. I got the feeling we weren’t considered big “gamers.”
Anyway, while I purchased the game, one of the employees downloaded some special, new Pokémon character onto my son’s Nintendo DSi (he yells if I don’t include the “i”). I think it was called Celebrex, or maybe that’s what I was supposed to be taking. Upon returning home, the woman side of me forced me to read the directions. They said we had to connect to the Internet through his DS in order to obtain the mystery gift. We tried to connect to the Internet but were not successful, thus more directions were read. The Nintendo Web site instructed me to enter a MAC address somewhere in the bowels of my router’s being. At least this is what I think I was instructed to do. I hit “save,” and the whole router crashed.
I then spent the next hour on the phone with tech support. Although I told them exactly what I had done, we had to go through the entire lineup of possibilities from the script. I had to turn off the computer, unplug the router, and re-enter my password as if I was an idiot who hadn’t tried all this before making the dreaded call in which I yelled out my phone number 10 times and said “yes! yes! no!” to some automated voice before being connected to the stupid help line. Because that’s always my first choice.
I ended up signing over control of my computer to the overlords so they could go (surprise, surprise) to the exact place at which I’d made my fateful mistake. He unchecked a box and everything was ok again. My son even connected to the Internet and got his stupid victory Pokémon. In my head I was thinking “You better be grateful,” but in real life I said “Yea for you! That is the greatest mystery gift ever! I’m so glad I spent the last few hours of my life getting this for you!”
If you enjoy talking to those automated phone systems and those wonderfully entertaining tech-support guys, by all means, get your child as many Pokémon (Pokémen?) as his heart desires. If you, however, enjoy having your hair attached to your head along with relatively stable blood pressure, then do everything humanly possible to keep your child from discovering Japanese animé. This quite probably means home-schooling them and locking them in the attic. You can never be too safe.
The Fretful Mother's Blog 
March 8, 2011 at 6:32 am |
That’s why men don’t read the directions; we go straight to tech support.