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Yesterday one of my coworkers brought her eight-year-old granddaughter to work for the afternoon. There's something about girls at that age, sort of caught between little-girl passions and pre-teen pseudosophistication, that I find really appealing (well, probably it's because I never quite outgrew that stage myself), and she ended up spending most of the afternoon in my office, which kind of sucked away at my productivity level, but there wasn't anything incredibly pressing I had to do, and so I ended up setting her to be my assistant for the afternoon, letting her do some filing and running things to other people's offices and inboxes, shredding paper, things like that.
Until I casually mentioned hedgehogs, that is. I have some little spiky silicone stress-balls on my desk, and A. was playing with them, and I told her that they looked like curled-up hedgehogs. A. didn't know what hedgehogs were, so I pulled up some pictures on the internet, told her about my childhood obsession with Mrs. Tiggy-winkle (my all-time fave Beatrix Potter book) and my toddlerish desire to be a hedgehog washerwoman when I grew up, told her that I'd once had a friend who'd kept one as a pet, and then I drew a picture of one for her, and she ended up spending the rest of the day drawing a big family tree of hedgehogs on my whiteboard, scouting baby-name sites for names beginning with H to name them all, telling stories about who got along with whom, outing all the Hedgehog family scandals for me while I posted 401(k) distributions. I helped out a little, told a few stories of my own, and thought I was doing everyone a favor by keeping an active eight-year-old occupied for an entire afternoon.
Well. My coworker came back to work this morning and told me that I was on her daughter's hit list because A. is now completely obsessed with the idea of owning a hedgehog of her very own. Hedgehogs are so cute, and the pygmy ones fit into the palm of your hand, and no one else has one, and they come in different colors! And she only has a fish and a hermit crab, not a really good pet! And she would take care of it all by herself! And it's all she wants for her birthday! And she's doing her internet homework and has discovered that there are breeders and hedgehog supply sites! She has read everything wikipedia has to offer on hedgehogs! She knows what they eat and that you can raise mealworms for them if you want! She wants to raise mealworms for her new pet!
...Oops.
Until I casually mentioned hedgehogs, that is. I have some little spiky silicone stress-balls on my desk, and A. was playing with them, and I told her that they looked like curled-up hedgehogs. A. didn't know what hedgehogs were, so I pulled up some pictures on the internet, told her about my childhood obsession with Mrs. Tiggy-winkle (my all-time fave Beatrix Potter book) and my toddlerish desire to be a hedgehog washerwoman when I grew up, told her that I'd once had a friend who'd kept one as a pet, and then I drew a picture of one for her, and she ended up spending the rest of the day drawing a big family tree of hedgehogs on my whiteboard, scouting baby-name sites for names beginning with H to name them all, telling stories about who got along with whom, outing all the Hedgehog family scandals for me while I posted 401(k) distributions. I helped out a little, told a few stories of my own, and thought I was doing everyone a favor by keeping an active eight-year-old occupied for an entire afternoon.
Well. My coworker came back to work this morning and told me that I was on her daughter's hit list because A. is now completely obsessed with the idea of owning a hedgehog of her very own. Hedgehogs are so cute, and the pygmy ones fit into the palm of your hand, and no one else has one, and they come in different colors! And she only has a fish and a hermit crab, not a really good pet! And she would take care of it all by herself! And it's all she wants for her birthday! And she's doing her internet homework and has discovered that there are breeders and hedgehog supply sites! She has read everything wikipedia has to offer on hedgehogs! She knows what they eat and that you can raise mealworms for them if you want! She wants to raise mealworms for her new pet!
...Oops.
