Recently I was cleaning out some stuff in storage and I came across one of those Pinpoint Office Toys. The little boy saw it and was instantly mesmerized. He could not run fast enough to get all of his spiderman, hulk, ninja turtle, etc. action figures to press against the pins. I was pretty amazed at how fascinated he was over the whole ordeal. Given the fact that he is only 2 1/2 I decided it'd be better if he did not make that a regular toy of his, I was a little afraid that he would drop the fairly heavy, mostly metal object on his toes or something. He nevertheless gained more interest in the "toy", so being as it is almost Christmas, he decided to ask Santa Claus for the toy.Well, lo and behold, Santa came through and in fact gave it to him a little early at the family Christmas party. This one of course is made completely of plastic and represents less of danger to my little boy. I do however have a few problems with the packaging and marketing of this said product.
First off, it's in one of those impossibly hard to open plastic sealed clam shells. You know, the ones that you either damage the original product by trying to force open it or by the scissors you are using. If you don't end up damaging the original product your bound to be lacerated by the razor like edges of the ripped polyvinyl plastic, and there is absolutely no escaping the multiple curse words you will use during the opening process. Besides, why does it have to be in one of those packages anyway, it isn't used to deter theft in any manner, and it certainly isn't protecting the pins from being damaged seeing as those were openly exposed. Needless to say, I only bent back my thumb nail while opening it.
My second complaint is that it explicitly advertises it as having 1000 pin
s. Now, I'm no Rain Man and I'm not even going to explain how it took multiple attempts to pass college algebra, but at first glance I could tell there was not 1000 pins (no less "Over 1000 pins!"). So, using a simple math technique I was able to retain from elementary, I multiplied the columns by the rows. 42 x 15 = 630.Why would they advertise it as "Over 1000 pins!"? Did they think no one was going to figure it out? Furthermore, why does it even matter how many pins? I can't see the amount of pins being a determining factor on my purchase! It serves it's purpose as being eye-candy and an otherwise utterly useless object. So...why do I care?
Jaxon playing with his new toy:
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P.S. The original metal one does indeed have over 1000 pins, to be exact 21 X 55 = 1155.
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