[QUOTE=Tentacle Monster]
I have very little experience with champagne (and absolutely none with Dom Perignon).
However, all the champagne bottles I’ve seen have had corks held in place with wire, and have a metal cap on top of the cork. To open, you just untwist the little loop of wire and the cork pops out under the pressure of the carbonation. Seems to me, it’s practically impossible to uncork a bottle of champagne with a corkscrew: By the time the metal cap is off, the cork is gone.
QUOTE]
It may be bogus, I am about 50/50 on it. But the cork of a champagne bottle doesn’t just pop out like you say, you need to apply some pressure pushing it out to get it started.
Dear Lord, a 13 year old drinking ALCOHOL! Pretty soon he might even be looking at PORN and listening to ROCK MUSIC!
Oh, woe! Woe! Woe unto us, I say! What kind of world is this when teenagers disobey authority and try to alter their mental state? Won’t some brave soul please step in and make those damn kids do what they’re told, and only what they’re told?
…
Anyway, it’s a shame the auction’s already over. If I had gotten to it sooner, and it seemed a little less bogus, I might’ve bought the PS2 just to send it back to the kid.
The kid deserves to have his PS2 taken away, if for no other reason, because of the expense he caused his parents. Also, he’s being supported by his parents, and by damn, if they don’t want him to break the law and drink, I don’t think that’s beyond unreasonable.
My dad made me pay far more than I expected for stamps that I took without permission. Certainly I didn’t break any laws by using stamps, but I knew ahead of time I had no business using those particular ones, and so for that, I had to pay. Anyone who tried to bail me out and protect me from paying for my own misdeeds would have been doing me NO favors, and would have been catering to my bad behavior. My dad had every right to make me pay for those stamps, and (if this eBay auction is legit), the mom had every right to sell this kid’s Playstation. Zero sympathy for the kid.
Please answer this simple yes or no question: was my dad out of line by making me pay for the stamps I used (without permission)? And if you think my dad was not wrong, then do you think this mom was wrong? And if you think she’s wrong, why? What distinction do you make between what my dad did to me and what this mom did to her kid?
If this story is genuine, I suspect that there’s a lot more history here. The kid could be an all-around defiant, destructive person. It probably wasn’t just one instance that set Mom off, but a culmination of a series of events. Perhaps it took a dramatic move such as this one to actually get through to him.
If this is the case, I applaud the mother. It’s not about rules and law and order, it’s about caring. It’s her job to make this kid fit for society-- she’ll be sparing him a lot of pain and grief down the road.
I guess I just don’t buy this “had to pay” stuff. It sounds more like revenge than discipline - he broke my bugle and drank some wine, so now I’ll take away the one thing he values in the world! That’ll make him so miserable he won’t dare to cross me again!
If this kid is anything like I was at his age, it won’t work. His parents will succeed in making him miserable, but not in convincing him that obedience is in his best interests. The only thing that he cares about, according to the story, is now gone, so what incentive does he have to do as he’s told in the future?
No favors? You mean, if someone had offered to pay that $10-$15 on your behalf, you would’ve turned them down?
Now, I was only half serious about buying the kid’s PS2 back for him. I have better things to do with my $122.50 + S&H than subsidize a stranger’s video games. He might be miserable, but I’m sure he’ll be able to entertain himself by spreading that misery back to his eBay loving mom.
If I may answer this one too: I don’t think what your dad did was out of line, because unlike the PS2 mom, he didn’t start auctioning off your favorite possessions to get the money back.
You’re acting as if this Playstation is the only one in the world and he’ll never be able to get another one. If he has money, he can easily pay for a new one. (If the parents forbid him, that’s a different issue, but parents do that all the time—sometimes with good reason. They know their kids better than you or I do.)
The incentive to not lose more stuff?
I was earning money at age 14, and I would have thought twice before taking something that belonged to someone else again. In fact, that’s exactly what did happen. My dad’s stamps were safe from me from then on. I knew that my dad was serious about making me pay for the stuff I swiped. It’s kinda like the real world, you know? So, perhaps this kid will learn that if he takes someone else’s (expensive) possessions, he’ll pay, by hook or by crook. Not a bad lesson, eh?
Tell me, are you deliberately pretending to miss the point or do you simply not get it? If you don’t get it, read my above comments about the “real world” and paying for the stuff that you take.
Maybe. Or maybe it’ll sober him up (pun intended). Maybe it’ll teach him to keep his paws off other people’s stuff. That’s a lesson worth learning.
If I didn’t have the money to pay my dad, (and if eBay had been a reality when I was a kid) I could see my dad selling something of mine that was easily replaceable. A PS2 is easily replaced. The kid can earn money and buy a new one.
I don’t know if the story is true or not, but in regards to three comments:
why not sell the games, too?
well, I don’t have a problem with that. In a way it’s harsher for the kid, just seeing the games laying around… (but eek! she sold the memory card. Sure hope he wasn’t in the middle of a game! )
They must not be hurting if they have a $120 bottle.
-Not true. They could have received it as a gift or won it. My firm for Christmas gave one away as a prize.
Why use a corkscrew on a bottle of champaigne?
He probably doesn’t know any better and was probably already tipsy from the beer…
Maybe the story is true, but probably not. The thing that’s for sure is that “mom” ruined the 120$ Champagne anyways by leaving it in the fridge for over a year.
Ahh, everything that’s wrong with the world neatly summed up in one post: Your action was not not your fault even though you knew it to be wrong because someone didn’t take every single possible precaution to prevent you from being able to do it. Dad should be able to say “This is my stuff. Don’t touch it.” and trust that he will be obeyed. It would be very respectful of Dad to take the time to explain why, but it’s not something he should be obligated to do. He should not have to lock things away in his own house to prevent his children from being irresponsible. Yosemite learned more from the incident than he would have if his father had just said “My bad” and left it at that. The problem with the world today is that too few people take personal responsibility for their actions.
In the story described on the auction site, the thirteen year old took beer and wine that don’t belong to him and that he cannot legally buy for another eight years, and drank them. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t know how much it cost because he most certainly knew it wasn’t there in the fridge waiting for him. Selling his PS2 is an extreme punishment, but it’s one he’ll remember for a long time, and maybe it will make him think twice in future. It won’t hurt him to live without a PS2 (last time I checked, they weren’t one of life’s necessities), and perhaps in years to come he’ll feel the same way that Yosemite does.
The OP said that he knew those stamps weren’t supposed to be used. That he didn’t realize that they were valuable is besides the point. He knew he wasn’t supposed to use them, ergo his father was perfectly justified in punishing him. Instead of beating him, or grounding him, or all sorts of punishments which really wouldn’t have been all that meaningful, he taught the boy a valuable lesson by making him pay to replace them. I think the fact that the OP remembers the story so vividly is telling: he really learned a lesson from that punishment.
What are people supposed to do? Lock every single thing that they don’t want their child to destroy behind a steel door? That’s absolutely impossible. There’s all sorts of things in the average home you don’t want your kids to play with that you can’t keep locked away, like the stove. Do you think if I don’t want my child to carve up the furniture, I should lock the furniture away, or if I don’t want him to stuff his sister in the dryer, I should have kept the laundry room padlocked? (It would just be easier to lock the child in his room, but that’s of dubious legality.)
In my opinion, it’s better to teach children to respect other people’s posessions. An excellent way to do this is to make them replace things when they break them. Then, they learn the value of these items.
My husband works in a prison, so he knows a lot of guys who were never taught that other people’s possessions are to be respected.
Cisco, you did not read my initial post. Here, let me requote it (bolding mine):
I KNEW AND I USED THEM ANYWAY. How much clearer could that be? I mean, seriously?
Bullshit. I earned money, he knew I earned money and he made me pay for what I knew I had no business taking. That’s a part of parenting: teaching your kid that the things that they steal (which is in truth what I was doing) will have to be paid for.
And your notion that because my dad left stuff out (that he told me I couldn’t use) somehow means that I shouldn’t have to pay for it if I use it is nonsensical. I was 14. I had a brain in my head. He shouldn’t have to treat me like a baby or a pet, who doesn’t know any better. If he used your reasoning, then anything in the damned house that I swiped shouldn’t have to be repaid, because it was left out. Hey, if I stole the TV, that was okay and I shouldn’t have to repay it, right? Because my dad left it out, right?
Lissa, I’m a she. It’s okay, everyone gets confused since I took the “babe” off the end of my username. And thanks, you expressed everything perfectly.
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