Dumb

Okay, I guess I need to preface this post about the recall of infant chairs by reminding you that all parents are psychotic. All of us. First, we decide to host parasites. IN OUR BODIES. Or, if we choose not to host parasites in our bodies, we decide to purchase someone else’s discards.

After the parasite phase, we go a little nuttier. Paranoia…OCD. We stack diapers. Do you understand how effed up that is? It’s seriously buggy.

And here’s the clincher. Parenthood, particularly being a parent to an infant, is living proof that the THEORY of evolution isn’t. Which is to say it isn’t a theory. Because everything that exists does so only to murder babies.

Seemingly innocent things were created by monsters – MONSTERS – to ensure that only the fittest of our species will survive. Pillows? Murder weapons. Blankets? Garottes. Stuffed animals? HOW CRUEL ARE YOU? Let’s don’t even TALK about other inert objects like coffee tables, doorframes, and, for the love of all that’s holy, THE FLOOR.

Human children have brains that are made out of sponges. Actual sponges. Like the things you find under your kitchen countertop (a veritable MINEFIELD of murder weapons down there). Babies are little wriggly helpless things that are invented to be cute so that we don’t simply sell them off to the nearest gipsy when there is poop, and puke, and sleep deprivation, and tears (notice no ‘or’ there).

WHO CHOOSES THIS LIFE? Crazy people, that’s who.

And then there’s this whole hormone thing that happens and there are, like, enzymes and shit that make your heart and soul turn to goo when you see the little blighters, and it’s really a good thing this happens because if anyone else on the face of the planet treated us the way infants treat us, there would be WAY more drive-bys and jumping each other in dark alleys. In fact, there would be more dark alleys. And baseball wouldn’t be a sport. It would be recognised for what it is, which is a form of torture.

I digress.

So because we’re insane with infants, we do things like invent little helmets for them to wear when they start learning to walk. So that they don’t bump their wee noggins on, like, stuff. Because it sucks to, you know, pay attention to them and recognise that for the most part, infants are, like sheep, driven to acts of suicide. (I shit you not. Observe THUDGUARD.)

I don’t even need to talk about all the things we invent and market to amuse, remove odours, clean, pacify, and commodify our infants. It’s like sometime in the 1950s everyone forgot that babies have been being born for, what, five thousand years? Or however long the Olympics have been around, so, like either three thousand or thirty, depending on your math…Anyway, we, as a species, have been having babies at least since left-wing god-hating communists invented dinosaurs to undermine the education system. And in that time, MANY babies have survived, whether or not they wear helmets.

The truth is that it wasn’t very long ago (fewer than 100 years) that babies died all over the place and people would have dozens of them in the hopes that a handful might survive to adulthood. So with the miracles of medical advances and through the staggering application of SCIENCE!!!, babies have a pretty good go of living through their first two years (and beyond!). I’m sure you know this already, but even sixty years ago, people considered it bad luck to name a baby before its second birthday because babies died so much.

Which brings to mind a zombie apocalypse made entirely of children under the age of two, but again, I digress.

So one of the results of this breeder psychosis is that we are particularly susceptible to products. Now…now here’s the thing. There’s been a big recall of a certain product, worldwide. Because of the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve purchased this product, there have been several (possibly as many as two dozen) incidents where improper use of the product has resulted in injury. So the company, being the consumer-conscious people they are, have decided to recall a product that works perfectly fine when used as directed, or, better yet, when used in conjunction with the active application of thinking. 

Case in point:

1. Who puts their infant ON A TABLE? Unless you’re changing its diaper, and even in that case, you oughtn’t be more than an arm’s length away. Why not sue THE TABLE COMPANY for not putting a warning on the table saying “Do not leave infants unattended on table”?
2. Babies, like sheep, are prone to staggering acts of attempted suicide. THIS IS WHY THEY NEED CONSTANT ATTENTION. Constant doesn’t mean ‘sporadic’. ‘Constant’ means ‘at all times’. If the baby is awake, you need to be paying attention to it. Why not sue the floor for refusing to properly mind your infant?
3. Babies are wriggly. Seriously. They’re all spazzes. If you say something too loud, or too soft, or in a funny voice, they do this splayed hands thing that looks like they’ve just completely short-circuited. While this is wonderfully amusing, it should indicate to you that babies have no motor control. So putting them into situations where you will later be surprised that they have no motor control is…well, it’s dumb, ladies and gentlemen. It’s dumb.

As I may have mentioned on Twitter, and to the nodding heads of IT help desk employees everywhere, you cannot idiot-proof life. You just can’t. If we could, there would be no such thing as evolution. So don’t blame the product if bad shit goes down when you use it wrong. If this infant chair, say, spontaneously combusted, or was three feet off the ground and on uneven casters with legs made of dry pasta, I might not be that upset over this. But that’s not the case. The damned chair is called a “floor chair”. IN ITS NAME.

“Here’s my secret: I’m *always* angry.”