I had one of those great conversations the other day. While walking back from his swimming lesson. Sometimes I kind of zone out and let him ramble on. But I do need to pay some attention as he asks questions from time to time. He decided he wanted to talk about video games. Yawn! Oh no! I can’t stand them, but will play along…

His two top games these days are Minecraft (an old fave) and Roblox (a relative newcomer for Dani). But he still likes an old one I covered previously – here – called Virtual Beggar. For the record, I really can’t stand Minecraft nor Roblox. The latter seems to be the game of the moment right now with all the kids around his age, and I am sure I need to cover it in a future post. At least Virtual Beggar makes me laugh. Just the concept is nuts. But the conversation started with a question that threw me…

Diligence

“Dad. Do you know what diligent means?”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean then?”

“It means doing or checking things properly. Being careful. ” I thought that was good enough.

“Yes” he agreed; as if he was just testing me. “It means being very careful.”

“Well, yeah. Is there any other kind of ‘careful’?” OK, I thought; where is this one going?

“In Virtual Beggar…” (aha, here it comes) “…I had people working for me. And this one girl, I should never have given her a job. It said that she was diligent so I gave her the job. But she only made me one dollar per hour. One dollar per hour! So I had to fire her.”

“What?! You had to fire her? What the *#&%”

“Yes. I had to fire her. I could make twice that much money myself just from begging!” he said, in one of those tones where they are almost pleading with you to understand their predicament.

“Ah yeah…well…Mmm… Yeah. Fair enough. If you can make more begging well mmm…” What do you say to that?

“But it’s good to be diligent. I don’t think I was very diligent when I hired her though.”

“Ah well lad. You live and learn eh?” – still struggling to take it all in. “Maybe you need to interview them next time. Just to double check and be on the safe side eh? Diligence and all that eh?”

He pulled one of those faces and said, “No. (pause) I’m not going to interview them. It’s only a video game.” As If I had lost the plot. I think I had at that point.

Ah yes. It is just a bloody video game.

Then the subject turned to Roblox. And I switched to auto pilot/semi-conversation mode…

Halloween is coming…

And so tomorrow is Halloween. Dani’s favourite fiesta. This year it should be fine weather (unlike last year’s downpour) and there are plenty of houses near by decked out with all the scary decorations that shout ‘yeas, you can call here for trick or treat’. More on the spook-fest to come…