Stuck on Stickers
Adhesives. You know... super glue, school paste, duct tape, bubble gum - that sort of thing. Handy stuff really. At least when in the hands of sane and normal people.
Super glue makes any dad look like Super Dad by affixing small parts (and fingers) to toys for a couple of hours until they get smashed again. School paste is unique as an adhesive in that it sticks to almost nothing, but does make a tasty snack. Duct tape, well... do I really need to explain duct tape? The universal fix-it tool. Duct tape can make "temporary" repairs to upholstery as well as radiator hoses. It holds my son in his seat at dinner (or at least I threaten that a lot). And I once repaired a school bus in a rain storm with a wad of bubble gum, but that's another story.
All these are great uses of adhesives, and I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where pro football players had to actually catch a ball with their bare hands. But with all this sticky technology about, I would think someone would be paying more attention to stickers. Why is it that I own a 15 year old bucket with a manufacturer's sticker which will likely outlive me, while the auto registration stickers can't seem to stick to the glass for two lousy years?
And toys!! What's up with the stickers on toys? The manufacturer's must have a vendetta against dads or something. Now I look forward to birthdays and Christmas because I get to put all the toys together. It's fun, and it also means I get to play with them all first. But more and more toys come with these sheets and sheets of stickers which need to be stuck all over the toys to add that final touch. It's bad enough that there are sometimes more stickers to put on the toys than there are molecules of matter in the toys, but they could at least use a glue with an adhesive quality a bit downwind of a Post-It Note. This is especially aggravating when the stickers require tweezers to apply.
It used to be that the boys would accept a sticker-less toy or perhaps a sticker deficient toy. Now they know that the toy is supposed to look like the thing on the box, and dammit they want stickers... now! All of 'em, and in the right place. They'll be checking.
Being a dad is tough. By the way, for Father's Day I could really use a roll of nano duct tape and a pair of those microscope goggles the surgeons use. Tyler's birthday is coming up ya know... Oh, and some super glue that doesn't stick to flesh would be nice.
