Tracking Toys

As often happens with technological gadgets, what was once a rarity and a luxury is now common place, novelties fast becoming necessities of modern living. And so it is with the ubiquitous GPS devices, now located in cars, cell phones and watches everywhere. Anyone can now find you at any given moment, much to the delight of overbearing parents and suspicious spouses alike. There's no getaway too remote for the damned devices—unless, of course, you happen to be sitting in your living room trying to access the Internet on your phone, in which case the service will be spotty even though the salesperson assured you that the signal would be amazing because of the proliferation of cell towers nearby. “Four bars at all times,” she told you when you bought the phone, apparently neglecting to mention that the four bars was out of roughly four hundred, or so it seems.

Now, I should confess that I am no technological Luddite, eschewing the creature-comforts of modern living in favor of a spartan existence. I'm not going to give up my GPS-enabled phone any time soon, nor will I be reading maps and compasses to find out which road is best for my horse-and-buggy trip to the blacksmith. I do wish, however, that the technological titans of our time would dedicate their collective energy to more serious pursuits. I have little need to have my phone recommend the drugstore or florist closest to my house. Nor do I need assistance to make the three mile trek to my office that I've done thousands of times. Instead, I have one simple suggestion, a request that will ease the pain and suffering of billions of parents worldwide. No, it's not for technological advances in the search for cures to malaria or AIDS or the need to provide potable water to billions in the Indian sub-continent or sub-Saharan Africa. These are worthwhile goals, to be sure, but they pale in comparison to the one innovation that will improve the lives of parents suffering through interminable meltdowns and torrents of tears. May the titans of technology join forces with the moguls of Mattel and start producing toys with GPS chips inside!

It's a rather simple and long overdue request really. My son throws a sudden and sustained shit fit every time he can't find his favorite toy car, a Mattel Lightning McQueen model from Cars 2. It is of no consequence to him that he has literally hundreds of other toys strewn haphazardly around the house. He's not interested in playing with the toy trains on the basement steps, the silly putty covering my slippers, or the bottle of bubbles that appears to be slowly leaking all over the new wood coffee table. When he wants his Lightning McQueen, well, he wants his Lightning McQueen. Like any good parent, I try to fool him into thinking that some of his other toys are actually Lightning McQueen. I tell him that I hand-painted Lightning a new color in order to try to pass off the blue toy car from Cars 2. No dice. I try to tell him that the new Lightning McQueen I bought last week—the one that changes color in the water—is much better. This time he looks at me like I'm a used Hyundai dealer trying to tell him that Hyundai is Korean for BMW. After my first (undoubtedly correct) instinct of lying fails miserably, I begin to actually look for the car. In the meantime, my son continues his tantrum, his incessant screaming only interrupted periodically for a few brief seconds at a time. (Later, I learn from my wife that the screams were only interrupted because they were muffled by a pillow on the floor. For those of you wondering, she didn't try to suffocate him. Turns out that he periodically buried his head in the pillow while he was hitting and kicking the floor. All I can say is that at least there were a few seconds of quiet, and I didn't notice any residual snot or slobber on the pillow, so all is good.)

Like almost all searches for my son's toys, this one was predictably futile. I checked all the usual spots—under the couch, between the couch cushions, under his bed, in the toilet (don't ask), and even in his sister's crib—with no success. I was about to give up completely (by which I mean I was about to drive to Toys 'R Us to buy a duplicate Lightning McQueen to pass off as the original) when my son found the toy himself. Apparently, as he was writhing on the floor he became a tad uncomfortable and noticed that the bulge in his pants pockets was poking him in the hip bone for he stopped crying and pulled his toy from his pockets. The cries stopped and, in between his sniffles with snot cascading down his face and over the front of his overalls, he told me he had found Lightning McQueen. Hardened by this experience and the three hundred or so other times my son has gone ape shit over a lost toy, I decided that life (mine, at least) would be so much easier if I could simply put GPS-enabled tracking devices on all his toys.

If Verizon can fit a tracking device in my phone, there's little reason why FAO Schwartz can't put them into its stuffed animals. I'm not concerned about any Orwellian implications, either. I'm not trying to monitor the movements of my children, and I have no interest in knowing if they are doing something untoward to the puppets in their rooms. I simply want to keep them from losing their toys. Besides, any concern over the overly watchful eyes of Big Brother is easily dwarfed by my interest in an hour free of shit fits. I only ask that the next time my son loses Lightning McQueen that I be able to track down the toy because of its embedded GPS chip. Now, I realize that I probably won't be able to monitor the toy's location from my smart phone since the phone is only smart when it has a good signal in my house—which is less than a mile from both the Verizon store and the nearest satellite tower—but that's a diatribe for another day. In the meantime, let's hope that the toymakers out there start contracting with their Chinese suppliers for toys with GPS chips. While it would be an ingenious ploy for the Chinese to begin tracking movements of all Americans, I'm undoubtedly willing to set aside national security concerns for something more pressing—the security of my sanity.