Not So Happy Meal

Happy Meals do not make me happy. In theory they seem like such a great idea—food and a toy in a little box with some puzzles, games, or jokes on it to keep the kids busy for a little while. And yet, they suck.

My kids almost can’t fathom that when I was a kid, Happy Meals weren’t something you could just order any old time. They were “for a limited time only,” and came along in connection with a movie or special event that informed the toy. Not so different from the way they’re presented today, but instead of having a Matchbox or Beanie Baby offering when there was no movie or other promotion, there just weren’t Happy Meals. I tell them this story, and then they ask me what it was like when there was no indoor plumbing, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Smartasses.

Then someone at McDonald’s woke up and realized that if Happy Meals were available all the time, kids would clamor for them all the time. That’s when things got complicated. When they were available all the time, McDonald’s started taking some heat for not offering “healthy” options, but still luring kids in to eat their food, so they found some “healthy” things to include. That meant that for awhile I had to poll my kids every damned time we went there—did they want the apples or fries? Did they want white milk, chocolate milk, juice, or soda? To say nothing of the initial hamburger/cheeseburger/nuggets option. So that’s 24 possible combinations, times 4 kids equals way too many fucking choices. The lottery odds have lower numbers than the count of possible Happy Meal permutations for my kids.

Now of course they give you both apples and fries automatically, but just last week I discovered that now they’re offering a choice of either apples or a GoGurt. Just shoot me. I didn’t even bother telling them that was an option. They just got the fucking apples.

McDonald’s used to be terrible about the toys. For a long time there was a Toy of the Week and if you didn’t get it the week it was offered, tough shit on you. Ever told a four year old who saw the toys in the display at the drive in, or in the lobby, tough shit you’re not getting Donkey from Shrek because that was last week’s toy? Yeah, I bet that went over well. Then it seemed they changed that, and sent a shipment of everything at once, but then you’d order four Happy Meals and they’d give you four different toys. Seriously? WTF? Come on, McDonald’s. It’s bad enough that I have to listen to the same two lines of dialog from Sulley that sounds like it was recorded through a set of walkie talkies, but to have to listen to them fight over who gets Sulley and who gets Mike  is just the limit.

Eventually they started giving out the same toy in every meal. I don’t know if enough parents threatened to beat the shit out of McDonald’s CEO, or if someone who works for McDonald’s took their multiple kids there for a Happy Meal and discovered that they did this, vocalized the problem, and a change was made at the corporate level, but I do know that now they put the same toy in every bag or box, at least at my McDonald's.

Thing is, my kids are too old for the toys. They’re at that age where they’re old enough to want them, but not old enough that the toys can hold their interest for longer than it takes them to consume a cheeseburger (2.6 minutes, give or take). When they were little, they’d bring them home and add them to the basket of forty thousand other Happy Meal toys, and Remy the Rat and the Madame Alexander Wicked Witch of the West doll would often find themselves in the same imaginary scenario. But now they’re too old to play like that, so they get the toy and fondle it for seven or eight minutes until they’re done with their lunch, then leave it in the car for four months.

 

Yes, you. I hate you all.

Photo credit: Photopin cc

They have what I think of as Trade Show Mentality. You know, you go to someplace where lots of companies are giving out stuff, and you must have one of everything. In spite of the fact that “one of everything” = three pens with various logos, five magnets with calendars on them, plus twenty seven “stress balls” in various shapes and sizes. The industry name for this stuff is “special products” but behind the scenes it’s referred to as “trinkets and trash.” You take this crap home and it clutters up your house for the next four years until you toss it out, but the desire to possess it in the moment is almost overwhelming.

Beyond the toys, Happy Meals no longer offer enough food for my kids. The boys especially are getting into the never-mind-a-plate-give-the-kid-a-trough-and-a-bucket-of-milk-with-a-straw stage, so they want the Happy Meal plus five supplemental items. It’s not so much the cost of this that bothers me—I’ve never bothered to calculate how much the Happy Meal components would cost if you bought them a la carte, so I have no idea if a Happy Meal is cheaper or not. What bothers me is that the more stuff you order, the greater the chance McDonald’s will fuck up your order. You’re with me here, right? If I can order two number whatevers with Cokes, plus two extra cheeseburgers with just ketchup, there are only three things they have to keep straight—what sandwiches, what size drink/fries, and nothing but ketchup on the cheeseburgers. If I order one cheeseburger Happy Meal with just ketchup, one with McNuggets, one with juice, and one with chocolate milk, plus two cheeseburgers with just ketchup, the opportunities for them to fuck up my order are almost countless. And based on my previous experiences, the temptation is just irresistible to them.

For now they still occasionally demand Happy Meals, and I usually give in and buy them, along with the twenty dollars in additional food. I let them have their moment with the toys, and as soon as they walk away from them, I take them and toss them in the recycling. I’ve never had a kid come back a day later and say, “Hey, what happened to that Mario Kart toy car I got yesterday in my Happy Meal?” The day will come when the orders will be simplified and McDonald’s won’t be able to screw them up. Who am I kidding—of course they will. Some things never change.

Tons of DIY Inspirational Country Wedding Elf on the Shelf Nail Polish ideas! lol

I’ve been spending some time on Pinterest lately. I've been on Pinterest for a couple of years now, so it's not like this was my first rodeo. Pinterest is a wonderful source of inspiration, and a great way to keep track of cool things from the internet. However, Pinterest has a problem I associate with theme parks, fairs and New Year’s eve in Times Square—if things are open to the public, generally far too much of the public shows up for it. And as we all know, the public is often stupid.

For instance, I was looking over the Holiday & Events board type. The things people pin in this category range from astonishing to moronic and back again. Craft ideas that clearly will not work without a license to Photoshop.  Recipes that sound not only disgusting, but downright lethal (heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chips and vanilla to make “hot chocolate”? Just typing that raised my cholesterol 10 points and gave me three cavities). Crafts that are just dumb—never in the history of ever has anyone looked a toilet paper tube painted white with a hat stuck on it and said, “What a darling snowman!” No, they looked at it and thought, “That looks like a toilet paper tube painted white with a hat on it.” Cakes so elaborate that they require a degree in Pastry from Le Cordon Bleu and a Fine Arts degree from Parsons to create. And then there’s what I call The Tacky, which should be a board type all its own. Rolls of Charmin lined up on the back of the toilet with evergreen branches stuck in them. A wreath made out of sawed off beer cans. Ideas that just scream, “We have a broken washer and dryer on our front porch!”

This has led me to feel that prior to being given access to Pinterest, potential pinners should be required to take a survey that reveals the type of pins they will be contributing. Depending on the outcome of this survey, they may be provisioned for a separate instance of Pinterest. One reserved for complete morons. Below is my proposed survey:

Instructions: For each question, please choose all that apply.

1) Do you regularly use the following when you write?
lol
ROTFLMAO
Best X EVER!
So stinkin' cute!
Totes adorbs

2) Will you use the following labels to describe images?
My Style
For my wedding one day
Someday when I have kids
When we have [stairs, a porch, an extra bedroom, etc] I WILL do this!
Tons of Elf on the Shelf ideas

3) Are you inclined to pin any of the following?
Pictures of cute puppies or kittens
Recipes made with "just three ingredients!"
Recipes made with candy bars, refrigerated crescent rolls, or Hershey's Kisses
Inspirational sayings
Pictures of heavily Photoshopped people in workout gear with a label that reads, "Motivation!"

4) Please indicate which of the following types of pins it might interest you to see on Pinterest:
Creative nail polish ideas
Anything explicitly labeled "DIY"
Crafts that use cutouts of the human hand in creative and unusual ways
Anything "country"
Elf on the Shelf ideas

5) Mark all those you find amusing:
Bathroom humor
Cute overload
Anything that says "ehrmegherd" on it
"Stay calm and whatever" posters
Stills from movies that have the lines the character was saying in that scene typed under them

6) Choose the word to complete the following sentence:
"If ________ too short to reach the shelf, use a stool."

a) your
b) you're

If you selected any under #1-5 and/or picked a) for #6, you are an idiot and must pin on the OTHER Pinterest, where people who have taste, good senses of humor, and a reasonable grasp of English language, spelling, punctuation, and syntax don't have to see your annoying crap.

I really think this approach would go a long way toward improving Pinterest, and will not be the least bit offended if Pinterest appropriates my idea.

Dogs and Dingbats

Our topic today is dogs. Not my dog, though. I do have a dog, but he’s not funny. In fact, he breaks a cardinal rule in my household that everyone who lives there is required to give me material or they’re out. He’s on notice.

Anyway, in the past few months I’ve had a couple of interactions with other people who have dogs, and it is they about whom we will be talking.

The first was an experience at the grocery store recently. As I was walking out of the grocery store, a kid on a skateboard came zipping through the parking lot, up to the door of the store, popped up his skateboard and walked in. A dog in a car parked in the lot saw this, launched itself out of the car (and into the parking lot traffic, which was fortunately going slowly enough that nothing bad happened) and ran into the store after the kid. (It was pretty clear the dog didn’t know the kid; it turned out the dog just didn’t like skateboards.)

I saw this, turned around and went back into the store. I alerted the courtesy clerk, who read the dog’s tag and made an announcement over the PA system for the dog’s owner. It happened that the woman who owned the dog was right at the front of the store, and walked up to see if this was, in fact, her dog. It was.

“My goodness!” she exclaimed, upon the realization that this was her pet. “How on earth did you get out of the car?” She kept saying things like, “How did you manage this? How in the world did you do this?” Gee, lady, I don’t know—maybe it was all four of the windows you left rolled all the way down? She was positively mystified as to how her dog was able to get out of the car and into the store.

She wasn’t concerned with why (to be fair, I guess it didn’t really matter), but she was baffled by the idea that a dog could jump out of an open car window. It was a pretty warm day, and it would have been wrong to leave the dog confined in the car, so leaving all the windows open was appropriate, but for the life of her she couldn’t conceive how the dog managed to get out of the car and into the store. Really, you dingbat?

But I seem to find myself often in the company of dingbat dog owners (point for research: is this because dog owners are more likely to be dingbats than owners of other pets?). The other experience I have to relate involves a woman at the video store, and her conversation with the male video clerk. And in this case, the woman dog owner was a dingbat, but the guy wasn’t much better.

The woman was renting “Marley and Me,” and she and the clerk were talking about their respective dogs. Now, point one: the woman talked in a baby voice and referred to dogs as “doggies” (acceptable only if you are under the age of 5), and point two: well, I don’t really have a point two beyond the fact that they were both dopes. They had this exchange in my hearing:

Her: What’s your doggie’s name?

Him: Charlie.

Her: That’s a great name.

Him: Yeah, I like one syllable names for dogs.

So right away my twitdar is going off. It’ll probably come as a surprise, but I have a very low tolerance for that sort of thing.

The conversation moved on to the movie she was renting. Now, maybe I’m just ultra-dialed in (fact: I am not) but even I know the basic tenants of “Marley and Me” and I’ve never read or seen it. Yellow lab, ill-behaved but irresistibly charming anyway, dies at the end. Right? This woman, who was apparently new to Planet Earth, or spent the last five years on a raft in the middle of the ocean with no contact with the civilized world, knew nothing about the movie beyond the name, and the fact that it has a dog in it. I assume she acquired this information from the box.

The clerk told her about his reaction to the movie, clearly trying not to give away the one critical plot point (THE DOG DIES). He told her how moving it is (THE DOG DIES). He told her how it made him feel really emotional about his own dog, Charlie (THE DOG DIES). He mentioned the amusing madcap antics of the main character (THE DOG DIES).

At this point the clerk who was helping me handed me my movie and said, “Due back Wednesday” or whatever. And thank goodness she did, because I was seconds away from turning to the woman renting “Marley and Me” and saying loudly, “THE DOG DIES.” (It took a lot of effort not to do this.)

I suppose it’s possible that I am a dingbat dog owner. I certainly confess that I have my moments of dingbattery. But I like to think that I’m at least capable of figuring out how my dog would go about getting out of a car when every single window was rolled all the way down. And also? THE DOG DIES.