Arlo, and by default the rest of the family, is still listening to Bob the Builder on any electronic device available. He’s insatiable. If you read The Saturation Failure you’ll see that we’ve been at it for a week now. Everyone on our street knows about it because he won’t even go outside without blasting it on my iPhone. “So you guys are still doing the Bob the Builder thing, huh?” Our response is a defeated and apologetic, “Um yea.” I can’t tell whether they’re appalled by our parenting (totally understandable), in awe of our patience, or desperate for us to leave and take our broken jukebox of a child with us. “Hey, no offense, but I can’t listen to Bob the Builder anymore. Feel free to visit again after you’ve weened him from that cartoon theme song.”
He now knows how to open Spotify on my phone, go to the search history, find the Bob the Builder search, and scroll through the 12 or so different versions available, playing each of them for about 8 seconds before frantically changing to the next. Occasionally, he’ll also want it on the TV. He’ll sit on the sofa watching the show and simultaneously flip from cover to cover of the song on my phone. He looks like a genius wall street broker or a professional sports gambler who tunes in and follows all the NFL games at the same time. A friend of ours has a 19 year old son who plays poker on the internet professionally. He makes around $300k a year doing it by playing 5 or 6 tables concurrently. My son is clearly destined for something similar. Let’s just hope it’s not air traffic control. I saw Pushing Tin, and that’s too stressful for anyone with even one strand of my DNA.
While pawing at my phone like a cat who stepped in peanut butter, he manages not only to call people, but also email and tweet about how much I’m enjoying his favorite song. It’s my phone, so I’m signed into all my accounts, and a certain combination of touches (which I don’t even know) results in a nice email to the first person in my address book letting them know that they too can use Spotify to find the Bob the Builder theme song. It’s fine that he tweets it because I assume all my followers think I’m being ironic. The icon for the Spotify app is the same color as the phone app, so he gets confused and frustrated when the phone won’t play the song. This results in numerous FaceTime calls to people I haven’t talked to in years. Now that those numbers show up in my recent calls, he’s dialing them over and over again. You’d think on occasion, he’d call my Mom and Dad and it would be cute. Instead it’s some guy who used to book a comedy room in Staten Island that I did 5 years ago.
So Tony Positano, if you have a 4 minute voicemail from me that’s a bunch of British guys singing a happy tune about their anthropomorphic construction crew, I assure you it was my son who left it.