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My nearly three year old has become a terror to electronics everywhere. In the past six months he has single-handedly destroyed my Wii video cables by jamming them in and out of the composite video inputs of the TV, which broke the connector and embedded it in the TV so that I can’t use my front inputs anymore.
Now just yesterday the power button on the TV is missing, it was jammed in and broke off only to fall inside the TV itself. With the power button being the size of a tic tac and no way to recover it, I had to tape up the hole and now only use the remote to power on the TV. Fortunately the TV in the kids room is an old cheap 27″ CRT and it isn’t my 48″ rear projection TV, but still toddlers and electronics don’t mix.
The problem is they have a natural curiosity to plug, unplug, plug again, as well as suffer from the button on, button off syndrome. It reminds me of Homer Simpson every time “Bed goes up, Bed goes Down…”. In the case of televisions (especially old style ones) you often have the set close enough to the floor that the toddler can reach the buttons and poke away.
When they factory test these electronics, they should hire a curious mob of toddlers to come in and stress test all the buttons and plugs before turning them over to sell to consumers.
-Justin Germino