Inventing Collections For Child Amusement
I enjoy collecting. I’ve seemingly always enjoyed collecting.
Whether by nature or American cultural consumer fueled behavior, I started collecting things early. Usually these were purchasable items designed to be collected via a random gambling system.
Your typical offenders, pokemon cards, pogs, crazy bones, magic the gathering, rocks (of the polished variety).
Though, as a child, the best thing I ever collected was a product of my own design. A group of objects I and a few good pals got half the school into collecting.
They were called bobs.
I was blessed divinely with the idea to start drawing faces on those butt plugishly shaped and entirely useless attachable pencil erasers. Everyone had hundreds at the time, which was great for propagation.
This particular time being the third grade.
With a pencil or pen, a creative and consumerism obsessed child could draw eyes, a mouth. Anything the kid could fit onto the triangular flat ends of these doohickeys.
In imparting a face, the erasers became the bob. And all bobs had a unique name.
Pointy eyes and fangs? Evil bob.
Big huge goofy smile? Gay bob.
One eye? Pirate bob.
One eye and a big huge smile? Gay pirate bob.
Split in half bob? Crippled bob.
Bobs came in many shapes and sizes with one strict rule: if the pencil eraser was a simulacrum of any existing object akin to an animal or person, it was NOT a bob.
It was just a stupid eraser. Blank canvasses only.
I recall several rich and silly children claiming their animal themed erasers were bobs. They were not bobs. Sorry children.
Whatever the bob creator decided was a bob, that was a bob. Everything a creator created went. Why a bob? Names are difficult. All children love the name bob.
“Dude, check out my new bob.” A friend of mine plopped his master piece on my desk.
“Woah. That’s tight.” The bob my friend was showing me was an amalgamation of erasers, paper clips, and glue. Constructed to form a bobish super robot.
His name was Parker. He was a bob innovator, my greatest pupil. Soley responsible for taking my naive idea of putting faces on bobs, and evolving it even further beyond.
Bob’s became more than simple faces, now bobs combined with each other to from super bobs.
All your gay bobs could become a super gay bob amalgamation. Or your saiyan bobs could go super bob robot saiyan.
As bobs spread from my close group of friends, to the playground, where it started to span classes, things got a little out of hand.
Somehow we developed a very loose table top style game in which each bob master would champion three of their finest bobs.
In true playground fashion, you’d have to wager some number of your bobs against one of your opponents.
In bob battle, the rules were impromptu and roleplay heavy. If you could convince your fellow bob master that your bob shot lasers that always crit for 9,999 damage, your bob crit for 9,999 damage. Though, because kids are stupid, I was the master judge everyone asked in times of contention.
I recall distinctly a moment in which a child named Matthew was locked in heated bob combat with a child named Jason.
Matthews bob’s really were nothing special, no creativity, no color scheme, simple well drawn faces at best. Matthew had no right to be ass blasting Jason’s entire bob team, yet he was.
Because when asked if it was legal for Matthews ice bobs to freeze, and then summarily never give Jason a turn, I asked if Jason had any fire bobs on this team.
Jason literally had Goku bob, and Vegeta bob.
But he didn’t have a fire bob.
So Jason fucking lost. And then cried because he bet ten bobs. Sorry Jason, Matthew was just a cooler dude than you.
My desk was full of hundreds of pencil erasers after a few months of bobbing it up. I literally never let anyone else win when they played me.
In order to maintain impartiality as the creator, I’d offer a draw in which no bobs were exchanged. This worked perfectly.
Children just let children take advantage of one each other. They’re very stupid and exploitable. I was the literal God of bobs, the creator of an entire grade wide consumerist addiction.
And they took unreasonably reasoned game logic as entirely reasonable. Simply because I was “The bob kid”.
Though my recollection is hazy, the origin of bobs likely grew as a result of a school wide ban on crazy bones, pogs, and TCG games on the playground.
Due to the all to common childly desire to scam younger kids out of their expensive collectables, at some point the school decided kids couldn’t bring glorified child gamba items to school any longer. One too many incidents in which a kid had to cry to their parents, who cried to the school, that their poor son timmy lost his holographic charizard to someone in a scam trade.
Turns out the school didn’t enjoy running small claims child court over every beanie baby, pokemon, and 7/7 mtg card that passed through child hands.
So, obviously, the bobs filled the missing gap of that all too desirable, scammable, gamblable, gamified object void that was left in our deviously stupid brains.
And uh, we were obsessed.
At some point, the total space occupied within any 3rd or 4th grade child’s desk was likely 70% bobs and erasers, and 30% everything else.
Us collection addicted children became obsessed in such great degree that we would RUSH the knick knack and eraser sections of scholastic book fairs.
A rush usually reserved for the video game section, now mere attachable pencil erasers were the dominant power attractor.
For those who don’t know what a scholastic book fair is, at least in my school, a few times a year, a pop up store would hit the library.
A week prior kids would be given a catalog with all the items and prices of what would be for sale to look over with their parents.
The idea being, a child could check off what they wanted, see how much it would cost, and bring the exact amount of money to school from their parents.
As an early collector of money, I usually just pocketed this money directly into my safe at home and lied to my parents that I spent it all.
Speaking of at home safe, I kept all that money in a blue, poorly secured safe with a dial code. My mother, when she needed to give my brothers money for something but did not have time to go to the bank, would break into the lock box with a knife and steal my rightfully earned money. I would then expand the truth and tell her she took more money than she did, collecting interest as I rightfully deserved.
But back to the book fair.
So, these book fairs sold books, educational video games, and knick knacks like erasers. The erasers were so hot, they immediately ran out every time.
Kids would literally be fighting over $3 packs of shitty erasers that couldn’t even eraser. It was awesome. They would be crying, as the eraser bin was immediately emptied.
A true work of art.
Anyway, eventually bobs got banned. It was quite uneventful. One too many incidents in which some smart kid convinced some idiot kid that they totally lost the fake game with no rules, resulting in a minor spackle, and uh, usually tears of some kind.
There was no major incident. As soon as it came, it was gone. I tried to keep bobs going as an after school thing, but it wasn’t the same.
Without a constant supply of bob noobs to exploit, amongst only my after school friends, bobs just couldn’t carve out a niche.