Brend
Happily, I get to meet those sorts of precocious little beggars on a regular basis. the nanny state hasn't captured all of them quite yet. Jensen engines still wind up in their hands and they all still have all their fingers and toes. A scorched finger at 10 or 11 is as educational as all hell.
I did have an "interesting" situation last Christmas. I got a call from a mother who was hell bent on buying her little angel a steam engine. She called about a dozen times over the course of a week, asking all sorts of questions about which model she should buy, along with questions that indicated she was clueless, but determined.
The day after Christmas, my phone rang about 9:00 am and it's the same woman.... sort of. Now she's ranting like a lunatic and cursing better than I do.... A LOT BETTER. She's going on and I'm trying to determine the problem, while she's hysterically accusing me of trying to intentionally kill her little darling. I'm beginning to think the kid is in some intensive care unit or burn center, but I kept my wits about me.
I finally got her "calmed down" enough to get the story from her. It seems her parents were there to see the kid open his gifts. She held her special surprise until the very last and then with great fanfare handed it her little guy to open. He unwrapped it and that was when Grand dad freaked out and began to tell stories of steam engines exploding and maiming or killing small children. He'd supposedly read about these events from several sources.
The weird part came when she accused me of not telling her that the thing got hot or that it used steam. I sat there, stunned, as I told here Jensen would be very happy to refund her money if she would just repack the engine and send it back to us. I did resist asking how she thought a steam engine would run without getting hot enough to make ...you guessed it.......STEAM!!!
I think about that poor kid sometimes and I wonder if he'll survive being raised by his own family. Needless to say, the poor chap never got to play with his new steam engine.
Steve