When my sister Trish decided that it was time for her daughter to put away childish things, she resorted to a bit of good, old-fashioned bribery. Figuring that 3 was old enough to give up the binky lifestyle, Trish let Molly know that, if she left her collection of binkies out for the Easter Bunny, he’d leave a present for her.
Present time?
Molly was so there.
All went well. The only blip – a minor one – occurred a few weeks later when Molly asker her mother, “Hey, what happened to my binkies?”
But Miss M got over that pretty quickly, and has now been binky-free for 13 years.
Sometimes, however, it’s more difficult to get your offspring to grow the f up.
As has been the experience of one Chinese father trying to get his slacker son up off the couch and into the workforce.
Xiao Feng is 23, and – at least in the view of his old man – addicted to online role-playing games, which is apparently this generation’s version of long hair, guitar, and bong.
And after he [Feng the son] failed to complete a placement at a software development company, his father stepped up his campaign to lift his son's eyes from his computer screen once and for all. (Source: HuffPo.)
Rather than cancel the family Internet access, or send his son off to addiction camp – imagine how much fun that must be in China: shades of the Red Guard re-educating all those folks who must have been subversive brainiacs because they wore glasses – Feng Senior decided to fight fire (power) with fire (power).
So he found some players who were at higher achievement levels in his son’s favorite games, and hired them to take out his son’s avatars – just snuff them out immediately when Feng Junior logged on.
The idea was that his son would get so bored of being relentlessly killed, that he would eventually give up.
But I guess you should never underestimate the perseverance of an addicted game-boy.
Feng Junior flipped his father the Chinese equivalent of the bird, and told him he wasn’t interested in settling. He was looking for the perfect fit.
The son told his dad that he wasn't looking for "any job, I want to take some time to find one that suits me".
This was enough for Feng Senior to have the online assassins stand down, but I think he may have given up on the pressure a bit too soon.
On the one hand, folks should look for a job that “suits” them. When the job doesn’t fit, you pretty much know it immediately. And it can make you profoundly miserable to stay in it.
On the other hand, you can learn an awful lot in a terrible job. How to get along with jerks. How to find ways to do something interesting and – dare I say it – meaningful with your day. How to ferret out the good guys. And, perhaps most important, how to crystalize in your own little mind just what kind of outfit would be your ideal workplace.
And even in the most god-awful job is seldom so irredeemably bad that you won’t have an occasional laugh or to.
Maybe Feng Junior figured this all out at the software company that he couldn’t quite hack.
Or maybe he’s just a spoiled brat who’d just as soon lump around the house all day online gaming, as opposed to slogging away at some boring job.
One thing I will say about working: nothing makes you focus on making the best of a bad job situation and/or finding a job you like better than knowing that you have to pay your bills.
Maybe it’s time for Feng Senior to switch to Plan B and start charging the kid rent. Or, at minimum, an access fee.
Game on, Feng Senior, game on.
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