My Million Dollar Ideas-- Free to You! (Well, Almost)

Every couple of years I come up with an idea so brilliant and amazing and revolutionary that I am forced to wonder: a) How come nobody has ever thought of this before?; and b) How many millions of dollars would I make if I actually got off my behind and attempted to bring this idea to fruition? Then I usually shrug my shoulders, eat another Twix bar and continue watching videos of amusing chimps on YouTube.

Clearly I’m no entrepreneur. I’ve never bothered to patent any of my ideas or even take the radical step of googling the phrase “How do I patent my ideas?” The only person I’ve ever shared my earth-shattering concepts with is my wife and she’s only slightly more entrepreneurial than me. (Of course, this is like saying Rush Limbaugh is only slightly more liberal than Michele Bachman.)

While the selfish side of me has been frustrated for years that my inherent laziness is causing me to miss out on truckloads of money, recently the selfless side of me has been weighing in as well. Forget the financial reward—these life-changing concepts can contribute to the betterment of mankind, so by doing nothing about them I am diminishing humanity.

This is where you, my faithful—and hopefully driven—readers come into the picture. Knowing that I am never going to follow up on any of my concepts, now, for the first time, I am going to reveal four of my best ideas in the hopes that some of you might act upon them and bring the world a sliver more joy and happiness. All I ask in return is that if indeed you become filthy rich as a result of this, you buy me a flat screen television. (*Note: by reading this blog you automatically agree to make Andrew J. Schwartzberg equal financial partners in any resulting endeavor and will relinquish 50% of all profits to him in perpetuity and e pluribus unum.) Onto the ideas…

The Watchdog – Although I am not a dog owner, it is clear to me from conversations with dog owners that sometimes dogs need to be walked. Indeed, it seems that often dogs need to be walked around the same time every day. Sometimes dogs seem to approach their owners in a manner that indicates that they (the dog) feel it is time for them to be walked. Perhaps the owner isn’t sure if it is, indeed, time for the dog to be walked and maybe they’re not wearing a watch or near a clock at that moment. Is it time to walk the dog or isn’t it? How can you know? Wouldn’t it be nice if the dog could tell you the time? Crazy, you say? Well, not with the Watchdog! The Watchdog is a dog collar that has a watch on it. It’s fashionable and practical. When your dog comes running and seems to want to be walked, all you have to do is look at its collar to see if the time is right!

Indoor Running Rest Areas – It’s summer vacation and you’re on a long road trip with your family. You have two young children in the backseat who are getting restless. You’ve driven for three hours and have at least two more hours before you hit the next rest stop. Boy would it be great if you could just stop and let the kids run around for 20 minutes before they kill each other in the car. Only problem is you’re on I-8 in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and it’s 115-degrees outside. Wouldn’t it be great if somewhere in the middle of this barren wasteland there was a gigantic, enclosed, air-conditioned, carpeted empty building that your kids could run around in? You bet your bippy that would be great! Yes, I’m talking about a building at least the size of a Costco that has absolutely nothing in it—no furniture, no merchandise, no structures of any kind. Cool, comfortable emptiness in which your kids can manically run around—and then hopefully zonk out for the rest of the ride as soon as they get back into the car.

Rentable Man Caves – We live in a small three-bedroom house and each one of those rooms is claimed by an inhabitant. The garage houses our minivan, the attic houses wiring, pipes and dust, and there is no basement. There is no good place for me to do private man things. If I want to blast Led Zeppelin or watch a gory horror flick, I do it on my 12-inch laptop while wearing a headset. Pathetic, I know. For years I wallowed in self-pity about this and one day it occurred to me that I can’t possibly be the only man in this predicament. While there are millions of guys out there who have managed to create their own man caves in a spare room or toolshed, there must be millions of others who have no such luxury. Would they pay $20 per hour to rent one for an evening? To get their own private man cave with a big screen television, incredible sound system, and fridge for beer and macaroni salad? I know I’d pay top dollar for a set up like this every once in a while. I envision a large retail space with a dozen or so soundproof units for rent. Once inside renters can do anything they want within legal reason…except listen to Michael Bolton. Man Caves have their standards.

Peripheral Frame Lenses – I have exceptionally good eyesight, so I’ve never had to think that much about glasses; on the other hand, my dad was an optometrist, so optometric thinking must be in my DNA. That genetic predisposition to eyewear knowledge came up big the other night while talking to my wife, who wears glasses. She mentioned in passing that due to the thickness of her frames, her peripheral vision is blocked while driving. In other words, the frame itself creates a blind spot for her. Oh, the irony! I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of making the frame out of opaque plastic, they made it out of the same material as the lens and made the frame itself to your prescription?” A second after the full impact of that thought set in I shouted, “I’m going to be a millionaire!” Then I went on eating my Twix bar.

Looking for Orange Juice-- Not Comedy

Every so often at my house, we have breakfast for dinner. Scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns—you get the idea. (And no, on those days we don’t have dinner for breakfast.) A couple of nights ago was one of our breakfast nights and as soon as the yolks hit the frying pan it occurred to us that we had no orange juice.  In order to avert this potential tragedy, I ran screaming from the house into my car and headed to the nearest convenience store. (The screaming wasn’t so much about the orange juice, as it was about the stubbing of a toe on the way out the door.)

The closest place to us that sells orange juice is a CVS located about a quarter of a mile from our home. So that’s where I headed with all due haste, since the eggs were frying and there was no time to waste.* I got a spot right in front of the store and trotted in. I quickly grabbed a bottle of Tropicana and headed to the checkout area, happy to see that there were no other customers around. “Great,” I thought, “I’ll be in and out of the store quickly.”

As I approached the counter, orange juice in hand, the cashier—an older, rumpled looking gentleman—said, “Are you old enough to buy that?”

“Uh, what?” I said, not quite sure I heard him correctly.

“I said, are you old enough to buy that orange juice? You better have some ID on you, son,” he said with a crooked smile.

Suddenly it dawned on me that he was attempting to engage in witty banter. I figured I’d give a quick rejoinder, grab my o.j. and get out of there.

“Oh no, don’t worry, it’s not for me. That stuff gives me the shakes.” Satisfied, sir? I played along with you there.

“Okay, because I don’t want to be responsible for what might happen to you if you drink too much of that.”

At this, I just smiled and nodded, thinking, “Ho, ho! You’re a crackup. Now ring me up, so I can be on my merry freaking way.”

But the man kept on going—making lame jokes about my CVS discount and telling me that he wanted me to come back later to give him one of the mimosas he was certain I would soon be making. So frazzled was I by his incessant attempt at amusing small talk that I ended up entering the wrong pin number into the machine, which only brought on a new barrage of sub-Carrot Top-level one-liners.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but probably only amounted to three minutes, I managed to get out of there with my orange juice—even as the barbs kept on being hurled toward me while I was walking away.

My first thought as I left the store was, “Sheesh! Is it really too much to ask to get in and out of a convenience store quickly? That’s the whole point of calling it a CONVENIENCE store! Having to wait through a Vegas lounge act when I’m just trying to buy a bottle of juice isn’t what I’d call convenient.”

Then, as I pondered the situation some more it occurred to me that the cashier, standing at a register in an empty store on a Saturday night, was probably bored out of his mind. Joking around with me was probably just his way to break up the monotony. And maybe I was the one being the jerk by not engaging with him more.

When I got back home, our breakfast-dinner (a.k.a. “brinner”) was not quite ready yet, so it turned out that in the end, the clerk’s feeble jesting really cost me nothing at all.

“Hmmm. Maybe I should bring the guy a mimosa after all,” I thought. But then I realized I didn’t have any champagne, and the last thing I had any interest in doing was interacting with a liquor store clerk.

*Rhyming unintentional  

Email Reveals Surprise Dutch Treat

Recently, while emptying my Junk E-mail folder at work, I came across one email that stopped me during my deleting frenzy.  The email subject was simply “Dear Andrew J Schwartzberg” and it was from “Dutch Law Firms.” I opened it and read the following:

Dear Andrew J Schwartzberg,

I am a Citizen of Netherlands and a Personal Attorney to Late Engr. Roxon Schwartzberg; I need your assistance in repatriate the funds left behind by my client. (Late Eng. Roxon Schwartzberg), before he died with his entire family. He deposited One Trunk Box/Diplomatic Personal Treasure, containing the sum of $12,752,000.00 with a security company here in Netherlands,

Every attempt to trace any member of his family has proven unsuccessful and abortive.

I'll give you more information upon your response to this plan with your full name, address and direct telephone.

Regards,

Advocaat Netherlands

(Attorney at Law)

(Personal Attorney to Late Engr, Roxon Schwartzberg) Friday, January 17, 2014

I was quite intrigued by this electronic missive from Mr. Advocaat Netherlands (an odd name to be sure, but hey, he’s Dutch) and wondered how it was that I never knew I had relatives in that part of the world. And I was deeply saddened that at the same moment that I learned of my Dutch relatives, I also learned that they simultaneously met a cataclysmic end. Indeed, morbid though it may be, I found myself wondering how that entire branch of the family all perished at once. Did it have something to do with Roxon’s job as an engineer?  Was he tinkering in his basement workshop when KABLAM! the whole house went up in smoke?  Or did Roxon go berserk, wipe out his entire family with a wooden shoe and then turn the clog on himself?  Or maybe they went out to dinner one fateful night and all succumbed to tainted sushi.

Of course, whatever caused the untimely deaths of Roxon and his entire family no longer mattered. What’s done is done and I was now left to deal with the financial ramifications. It seemed odd that Roxon would choose to place $12,752,000 into a Trunk Box (presumably half trunk, half box) rather than have it spread across various bank accounts and investments, but Roxon was kin and I trusted him implicitly. The only real question that remained was what to do with that kind of money.

As a grant writer, the first thing that came to mind when I saw the eight-figure sum I had coming to me was to use it all to start a foundation on behalf of the deceased—The Roxon Schwartzberg Foundation.  The tricky part, however, is that I would want to distribute the money to the causes that Roxon held close to his heart, but I have no idea what those were.  Would he want to save the rainforests? Or find a cure to eczema?  Or provide honorariums to starving puppeteers?  Without knowing Roxon’s wishes I could potentially do more harm to his legacy than good.  For example, if I distributed funds to the Jane Goodall Institute, but it turned out that Roxon had a deep-seated fear of chimpanzees, I would never be able to live with myself. No, well-meaning though it might be, starting a foundation with these millions would cause too much of an ethical dilemma.

My next thought was that I could use these funds as seed money to start an engineering firm in Roxon’s honor. But, of course, this idea poses the same type of problem as the previous one. I don’t know what kind of engineer Roxon was. Was he an automotive engineer? A computer engineer? A structural engineer? A biomedical engineer? There are dozens of possibilities and the reality is that I struggle with long division, so no matter what type of engineer he was, I may not be the most qualified to start an engineering firm.

Finally, I thought it might be best for me to spend the money on a Samsung 85-inch Ultra HD TV, a 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder, and 300,000 Kit Kats.  And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that Roxon would have wanted it that way.

Of course, the first step is to get a flight over to Amsterdam to claim what’s rightfully mine.  Once I have the money in hand I’ll not only be able to make all the purchases I mentioned above, but will also be able to pay for a separate trip to Africa to claim the additional monies I have coming to me from a Nigerian prince.

Looks like 2014 is going to be a VERY prosperous year!

Whatever You Do-- Do NOT Share This Blog!

I receive no financial compensation for writing this blog. No jewels. No precious metals. No Godiva Dark Chocolate Vanilla Mousse Truffles. Nothing. Of course, I did not begin writing this blog back in August 2012 with the idea that I would, or should, get anything in return. All I wanted to do was find a new outlet for my writing in an effort to force myself out of a two-year period of creative dormancy (followed by a brief period of scattered thunderstorms). So I signed on to Blogger and started posting my miscellaneous ramblings. I sought nothing in return.

Soon after opening my Blogger account I noticed that they have a stats page that tells you how many people view your blog. “Oooooh! That’s cool!” I thought, and I wondered how many people would read my stuff. Right away I did some calculations.

According to Wikipedia there are 254,295,536 people with internet access in the United States. To make the math easy, I decided to round down to 250,000,000. Because I: a) didn’t want to be presumptuous, and b) figured that there are a lot of busy people out there who simply didn’t have time to read my blog, I took a conservative guess that only 1 in 20 people would check it out. That works out to about 12,500,000 blog readers. Pretty solid premise, right?

After I wrote my first blog entry (about being freaked out that someone running for Vice President—Paul Ryan—could possibly be younger than me) I emailed it to friends and family and posted it on Facebook and Twitter. Then I waited 24 hours and checked out my Blogger stats page expecting to see an eight-digit number. What I saw was the number 81. Yes, of the 254,295,536 internet users in the United States, 81 of them looked at my blog. (Well, actually 80, because one of the readers was my friend Rick, in France.) “Hmmm,” I thought, “maybe the others will come around when I post my next blog entry.” But my next entry yielded only 45 readers.

I wondered how I might go from 45 readers to several million, and as I researched I realized that I needed one of my blog entries to go “viral.” Yes, just like influenza, my blog needed to be shared by so many people so rapidly that it would quickly infect the entire country. But how one makes their blog that contagious has eluded me all this time.

I’m sure there must be some secret techie way to do this that I’m just not aware of. I know that others have made their various videos, images, and essays go viral, but I’m not quite clear how. The one sure way seems to be by over-tipping a waiter or waitress. I’ve noticed that about once a week some waitress from Red Robin or Hooters or Olive Garden posts a credit card receipt from a mysterious patron who tips them $900 on their $20 tab, and the next thing you know everyone within 50 feet of a computer has seen the heartwarming story. Problem is, I’m a mediocre tipper, so I’m certainly not driving up my page views this way.

Truth is, I’ve been scratching my head about this since I first started blogging a year-and-a-half ago. I know no conventional means to make my blog go viral, so I thought I might attempt the tried and true method of reverse psychology. This is why I’m telling everyone who is reading this blog (all 38 of you) not to share it with anyone. DO NOT SHARE!

And I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, Andrew’s being a real jerk about this. He can’t tell me what to do. Just to spite this yutz I’m going to share this with everyone I know.” Don’t do it! I’m telling you—it’s a huge mistake!

As I said at the beginning of this essay, I am doing this blog purely as a creative outlet. I want nothing in return—not even 12,499,955 more readers. SO DO NOT SHARE THIS BLOG! 

I’d Like to Thank the Academy for Getting Me Through My Dental Cleaning

Today I had a dental cleaning—one of life’s many necessary evils. Indeed, it is one of the more evil of the necessary evils. The thing that makes them particularly heinous to me is the fact that the dental hygienist is in close proximity to various numbing agents, but it never seems to occur to her to use them. Maybe she figures that the discomfort she inflicts by digging under my gums with metal scraping instruments is the kind of thing a strapping adult male like me should easily tolerate. Or perhaps she figures that the overt pleasantness she exudes during the procedure should itself act like an anesthetic upon my throbbing mouth. Well, in either case she’d be wrong. She cleans while I suffer.

Over the years, though, I’ve developed a pretty solid method for at least tolerating my dental cleanings without crying like a babe fresh out of the womb. To take my mind off the violence going on inside my oral orifice, I concentrate extremely hard on one of two things—Scrabble or the Oscars. If it’s a Scrabble dental cleaning day, I think about what club and tournament players call “bingo stems.” That’s a series of six common letters that, when combined with another letter, can get you a seven letter word and a 50-point bonus. So, for example, the bingo stem “SATINE” when combined with an A gets you ENTASIA or TAENIAS. I’ll mentally go through the whole alphabet trying to remember every seven letter word you can get from “SATINE” and once done I’ll move on to “SATIRE,” and so on. Usually, by the time I get to the bingo stem “STONER” it’s time to rinse and spit, and my agony is over.

Today, however, knowing that the Academy Award nominees would be announced, I decided to make it one of my Oscar dental cleaning days. I start with the year I was born—1969—and go through year by year up to the present, trying to remember what won the Oscar for Best Picture. So when the scraping of my bottom back molars began I instantly thought, “1969 – Midnight Cowboy. Great movie. Gritty—just like my teeth are starting to get from the scraping.” For the next 15 minutes I continued my personal coping strategy…

1970 – Patton. Guess it was okay but kind of (Ouch! That was a nerve!) overrated.

1971 – The French Connection. At one point Gene Hackman drives past my high school in the famous chase scene. Cool!

1972 – The Godfather. I bet if my dental hygienist touched Don Corleone this way she’d end up sleeping with the fishes.

1973 – The Sting. Yup, felt the sting on my lateral incisor just now.

1974 – The Godfather Part II. Great movie, but I still can’t understand how anyone thinks it’s better than the first one.

1975 – One Flew Over the (Owwww! You caught my lip!) Cuckoo’s Nest. What I wouldn’t give for some of the sedatives McMurphy took right about now.

1976 – Rocky. The first one of the best pictures I saw in the theater. By round 15, Balboa’s mouth was only slightly bloodier than mine is at the moment.

1977 – Annie Hall. Woody at his finest. I bet he thinks about baseball during dental cleanings.

1978 – The Deer Hunter. I can’t believe I still haven’t gotten around to (Yikes! Watch it with that thing, it’s sharp!) seeing it.

1979 – Kramer vs. Kramer. The first year I remember watching the Oscars. Rooted for Dustin Hoffman to win Best Actor and was ecstatic when he did! I was not like other kids my age.

1980 – Ordinary People. I know everyone thinks Raging Bull got robbed, but I still prefer Ordinary People.

1981 – Chariots of Fire. One of my favorite (Ahhh! Another nerve!!) movies of all time.

1982 – Gandhi. Okay, this time I was like normal kids and rooted for E.T. I wonder what dental cleanings are like on his planet.

1983 – Terms of Endearment. Give me the shot! GIVE ME THE SHOT!

1984 – Amadeus. Another one of my favorites. What the hell ever happened to Tom Hulce?

1985 – Out of Africa. What a snooze-fest. I’d rather have another dental cleaning than see that dreck agaAAAAAAAHHHHH. Okay, maybe not.

1986 – Platoon. Very good movie—remember almost nothing about it.

1987 – The Last Emperor. Another one I need to see…when I have three hours to kill.

1988 – Rain Man. Another Dustin (Whoa! Here she goes with that sucky thingy!) Hoffman classic.

1989 – Driving Miss Daisy. Tough to know what was slower moving—Miss Daisy’s car or the movie.

1990 – Dances With Wolves. All I can think about are canine teeth! Canine teeth! Please get off my canine teeth!

1991 – Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter would be (Aaaargggghh!) enjoying himself about now.

1992 – Unforgiven. I thought I didn’t like westerns. I thought I didn’t like Clint Eastwood. So how come I liked this movie so much?

1993 – Schindler’s List. Great movie but I can never (Aaack! That’ll leave a mark!) think of it without picturing Jerry Seinfeld and his girlfriend making out in the theater.

1994 – Forrest Gump. Run, Forrest, run! As far away from the dentist’s office as you can!

1995 – Braveheart. Not feeling very brave right now.

1996 – The English Patient. I always get the sense that I’m the only person under the age of 70 who actually liked this movie.

1997 – Titanic. Never saw it. Never will. “And Iiiiiy-iiiiiiiy-iiiii am in lots of pain!”

1998 – Shakespeare in Love. Great movie. So was Saving Private Ryan. But I like Shakespeare in Love more. So there!

1999 – American Beauty. Same year as American Pie. Tough to get those two confused.

2000 – Gladiator. Can’t help but think, “Joey, do you like movies about Gladiators?”

2001 – A Beautiful Mind. Two years in a row for Russell Crowe! Who’d of thunk a movie about a mathematician could be (Gaaaaaahhh!!! Seriously??? I thought you already got that tooth!) so fascinating.

2002 – Chicago. It was entertaining, but Best Picture? Really, people? Really?

2003 – Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. This cleaning is starting to feel as long as the entire trilogy.

2004 – Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood again. I thought I didn’t like him, but he keeps on proving me wrong.

2005 – Crash. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

2006 – The Departed. Far from Scorsese’s best, but at least he finally got the damn thing.

2007 – No Country for Old Men. Far from the Coen Brother’s best, but at least they finally got the damn thing.

2008 – Slumdog Millionaire. I remember that advanced screening I got to go to with Danny Boyle taking questions afterwards. That was a cool (Aaaahhhh! Be done already, you vile woman!) experience.

2009 – The Hurt Locker. No movie title could possibly describe my mouth better right now than this one.

2010 – The King’s Speech. Another one I haven’t seen. Maybe I’ll skip my next dental cleaning and watch this movie instead.

2011 – The Artist. A silent movie winning Best Picture in 2011!!!! Can it get any cooler than that???

2012 – Argo. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggooooo!

And suddenly I ran out of years, but the hygienist still had two teeth left to work on. Crap! I had nothing to distract me from the next 90 seconds of pain and misery. Well, maybe if I start memorizing Golden Globe winners I’ll be ready for my next cleaning.

You Take Hercules, I’ll Take the Heat

Every year between about June and September I get all kinds of grief and derision thrown my way from friends and family living in the Northeast.

“How can you stand to live in 120-degree weather?” (We use a machine called an air conditioner.)

“You can fry an egg on the sidewalk out there!” (Perhaps, but it wouldn’t be very sanitary.)

“You must be insane!” (I…um…well, you got me there—but it has nothing to do with the heat.)

Yes, it’s true—it gets extremely hot in the Phoenix-metro area for about three or four months every year. But the heat never stops our daily lives. We drink lots of water, stay indoors where it’s cool, and sometimes splash around in one of the 43 gazillion pools in our area. Such a tough life we lead in the summer months. I understand why you mock me on an annual basis.

So forgive me my dear friends and family back east if I take a little bit of evil pleasure in seeing the barren, arctic wasteland you are now living in as a result of Winter Storm Hercules. From what I can discern from the plethora of Facebook posts I’m seeing, most of you cannot get to work, many of you are shivering your proverbial “tushies” off shoveling snow, and a decent amount of you are soon going to run out of hot chocolate.  According to weather.com, there has been 7.4 inches of snow in the past 24 hours and it is currently 21-degrees in the Brooklyn neighborhood in which I grew up—with a wind chill that makes it feel like it is 6-degrees. Right now in Phoenix it is 70-degrees, with a wind chill that makes it feel like it is 70 degrees. Hmm…guess there’s no wind today.

Of course this winter storm is not a one-time isolated event for those of you back east. You get several of these every year. Last year in New York City a total of 26.1-inches of snow was recorded in Central Park. In the winter of 95-96 (just a few months after I moved to Arizona) there was a record 75.6-inches of snow dropped on the Big Apple. Checking the record books, that year in Phoenix there was a grand total of zero inches of snow. Who’s insane now? Who’s eating eggs off the sidewalk now? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Okay, I’ve had my little gloat fest. Perhaps in a few months when you hear about triple-digit temperatures in Phoenix you’ll think twice before giving me so much crap…but I doubt it.

Santa Doesn't Hate You After All

Well, it finally happened. After eight Hanukkah/Christmas seasons with children in our lives, we finally found ourselves having to hunt down one of the “it” toys. You know what I’m talking about—a toy so popular it flies off the store shelves quicker than a starving monkey unpeels an overripe banana.

The funny thing is that going into the hunt we didn’t even realize we were going to have a hunt on our hands. When our four-year-old son told us he wanted Zoomer the Robot Dog for Christmas, we had no way of knowing that every kid within a 340,000-mile radius would be making a similar request this season.

The truth is that our whole family is generally out of the loop when it comes to the hot new products of the season. Our television viewing is confined solely to PBS and Netflix, so our kids have zero exposure to commercials. Of course, the way that advertising permeates our society, it’s impossible to shield them from all forms of ads (short of keeping them in tightly regulated padded cells, which is an option we’re currently mulling over).

It turns out my four-year-old son found out about Zoomer from what I would have considered an unlikely source—“National Geographic KIDS” magazine. For the most part the magazine features a series of goofy yet educational articles about animals, but a recent issue had a story on cool new toys coming out this year…and Zoomer was the headliner.

We were initially casual about purchasing Zoomer, because we had no way of knowing we needed to be aggressive. We didn’t start our search until the evening of December 13^th—just twelve days before D-Day. That night, well after our sons went to bed, we looked Zoomer up on the Target website to see what it was our son was pining after. We watched the demo video, determined its purchase would likely not be detrimental to our son’s physical or mental well-being, and decided this would be his big gift from Santa. At that point my wife suggested I click on the “Find in Store” link just to make sure that our local Target carried the thing. I did so and to my utter dismay found that of the 20 Targets that came up in my search, it was out of stock in 18 of them. The only two stores it was still available in were 30-minute and 40-minute drives away from us—and both were closed at that late hour. I became vaguely nervous.

“Maybe they have them at Toys-R-Us,” I opined. The Toys-R-Us closest to us happened to still be open at the time (holiday hours and all) so I gave them a jingle (holiday terminology and all).

“Toys-R-Us, how can I assist you?”

“Hi, I wanted to see if you have Zoomer the Robot Dog.”

“Zoomer the Robot Dog? Let me put you on hold while I check.”

Ten minutes (not exaggerating) of being on hold later…

“Toys-R-Us, how can I assist you?” (I can tell this is clearly the same woman I spoke to originally).

“Um…you had me on hold for a while. You were going to check to see if you have Zoomer the Robot Dog.”

“Oh yeah, the other associate was on the computer. She’s off now. Let me put you on hold while I check.”

Ten minutes (still not exaggerating) of being on hold later…

“Toys-R-Us, how can I assist you?” (This time it’s clearly a different woman).

“Somebody else had put me on hold. She was going to check to see if you have Zoomer the Robot Dog.”

(Shouting) “Hey, Mike. Can you check the endcap to see if we have any Zoomers left?”

(Three second pause.) “No, sorry. We’re all out. Those things get snatched up as soon as we put them on display.”

And so it was that the next day—a Saturday—I woke up at 7:00 a.m. so I could drive 30 minutes due north to be at one of the two Targets in the Phoenix metropolitan area that the internet claimed would have Zoomer in stock. I arrived ten minutes before its doors opened up at 8:00 a.m. While I waited another man of about my age showed up and waited too. I wondered if he was also there for Zoomer and that terrifying thought led to the more sinister thought that as the doors of Target opened it might behoove me to kick the man in the shin with every ounce of strength I could muster and then take off running down the main aisle in search of the blasted robot dog.  Luckily that thought was a fleeting one and never came to fruition, so I avoided potential assault charges. When the doors opened up I did speed walk to the toy section though, but could not locate Zoomer. I flagged down a young associate.

“Excuse me, do you know where Zoomer the Robot Dog is?”

“I’m pretty sure we’re sold out,” he said.

“But I went online last night and it said that your store still had it.”

“Well, we can check, but that information is usually about 24 hours old.”

We checked and where Zoomer should have been we found nothing but a gaping hole.

I left, dejectedly, and decided to check out the Toys-R-Us across the street from that Target, since it was not the same one I called the previous evening. There I was told that not only was it sold out at that location, but they would not be getting anymore in this year.

Suddenly it seemed like Santa might not be bringing our son what he wanted for Christmas. I found myself trying to come up with elegant ways to tell my four-year-old that Santa didn’t like him as much as his older brother (who would be getting the new bike that he asked for).

A few days later my wife and I went to the Toys-R-Us nearest to us (the one that fruitlessly put me on hold for 20 minutes) for some lower end gifts. On a whim I decided to ask the person at the customer service station if they had Zoomer.

“We only have one. It just got returned today,” she said, producing one from behind the counter to my utter amazement. The one catch was that it was purple—in other words it was a “girl” Zoomer.

It turns out that the company that makes this highly coveted robot dog has produced two versions. One is white with black spots—which is what my son had seen in the magazine—and the other is purple with no spots and a very feminine looking dog collar. My wife and I quickly assessed the situation and determined that it was better to get our son the purple Zoomer (and have him think that Santa believes him to be metro) than no Zoomer at all (and have him think that Santa had him on the naughty list). The robot dog was purchased.

A few days later my wife was out shopping with her BFF (I’m not quite sure what that means, but I’m too embarrassed to ask) and the topic of robot dogs surfaced.  As it turns out her friend had purchased the standard white and black Zoomer for her daughter a month earlier at Walmart. (Ah, Walmart! We never thought to look there since we don’t actually shop there.) When my wife told her we had to get a purple Zoomer for our son, her friend offered to trade, since she thought her daughter might prefer the purple dog anyway. Unbelievable!

So our four-year-old got exactly what he wanted for Christmas and doesn't think that Santa hates his guts— at least not this year. Who knows what he might ask for next year. Maybe it's time we cancel our subscription to "National Geographic KIDS."

Proud Owner of a Robot Dog