How many times have you heard this scenario? Kid does something stupid/irresponsible/that the parents simply have told him not to do, parents get pissed off, and decide to revoke some privelege or another. Kid threatens to call the police. In my family growing up, there was always a snarky response that went along with it. In a family in Illinois, it had a completely different response. The kid ended up not meeting a whole lot of actual resistance, and went about the business of promptly calling 911 after his parents removed his XBox priveleges–quite probably due to the fact he was playing that as opposed to cleaning his room.
I’d love to have been the dispatcher for that call. Especially when he called specificly to ask if that was within his parents’ rights. And then, promptly hung up. So, the dispatcher sent the police to his address, where he was promptly owned. Not only was he informed the parents were well within their rights, but he was also advised that it might perhaps possibly be wiser to maybe consider listening to them. My money’s on the kid behaving just a little bit better now. If only temporarily. Or at least, now the parents will have some more creative threats for the kid if he doesn’t.
2 responses to “Give me back my XBox! I’m calling the police!”
Kind of reminds of that Carlos Mencia joke, about how when he was growing up he wouldn’t have EVER threatened to call 911 on his parents because his mom would have set the phone right down in front of him and said, “Fine, you call 911, but before you that, you’d better call an ambulance first and tell them there’s a dead body here!”
That was the general rule in our house. You call 911, there’ll be 3 things happening in quick succession. Me hitting you, you hitting the floor, and the ambulance hitting 90.