Constructive Criticism

I'll always remember the moment when an 8 year old me completed a magnificent Meccano helicopter with my dad, only to be bitterly disappointed that despite the expert building, the helicopter couldn’t actually fly.
This 'failure to launch' related sadness has haunted many areas of my life since that ill fated day, but only recently did it rear its ugly head to fuck with my mind once again.
Working in a toy shop is the best job in the world (besides being a train driver) simply due to the perks. For example, the other night, I was given the dream opportunity to take home a toy to test for the next day. I know right! Best job ever! So you understand my sheer joy and excitement when I was asked to build the dozer from the Meccanoesque 'Nuts N' Bolts' construction range. I can assure you; pants were wet!
Within an hour of building, this spark of happiness crumbled under the weight of frustration, anger and general murderous rage as I began to realize that this set in particular was the toy equivalent of a screaming Baboon's oily turd.

1. To start with, the toy itself feels, and acts flimsy, and has 'cheap Mecanno tribute act' written all over its dreary silver framework. I actually had to bend some of the plates back into shape so that they would warrant the adequate use for building, and pretty much serve their fucking purpose.

2. I thought the whole point of this style of toy was that everything is held together by reliable screws that never let you down. Obviously, somewhere along the way, the design team has decided that this feature was too traditional, and instead opted for a more entertaining, yet bastardized format where each nut has its own corresponding bolt resulting in endless searching through every part like some sort of idiot counting rice. It’s interesting that they chose to name their product range after the most useless and impractical element of the toy.

3. The sodding instructions are full of misprints, irregularities and vague diagrams which continually lead to poor construction and mistakes, which happen so much that you begin to believe that this ‘age 6 plus’ toy is beyond your reasoning, and that your whole life up until that point was clearly a joke and that everyone in your life, namely a bunch of second rate toy makers, have been laughing at you from a distance. The cab section you have spent 2 hours building starts to fall apart all because they decided, for a laugh, to alter the picture between steps. Ha ha, silly me. What a hoot! These guys are as funny as bowel syndrome.

4. The dozer doesn’t move once built.

So there I was. I’d relapsed back to that pained youth realization that this toy is just, a toy. When I was 8, this problem quickly faded when playful imagination kicked in. But there’s not much to imagine when all you have is a heap of cheap metal, except the supreme feeling of justice upon smashing said metal heap into the Nuts N’ Bolts design team’s smirking faces.
As with my helicopter all those years ago, the Nuts N’ Bolts toy range is destined to never take off if it continues to mass produce sloppy excuses for toys, which will never exist within the same quality league as Mecanno.
I’m off to build a wall out of Lego bricks to block out all the bitter memories……