the 100-year toy

by Michael E. O'Reilly

The year’s best idea at TopFunToy generated envy and jealousy among every in-house designer who hadn’t thought of it. Memos of praise gushed down in great waves from the executive floor to the creative department. When the concept for MiniMan™ was green-lighted, big meetings happened. Pricing was determined, distribution was arranged, advertising campaigns were rolled out. Orders were taken, and shelves were stocked in time for Christmas.

Everyone at TopFunToy hoped their newest product would be more than just a holiday hit. They wanted MiniMan™ to transcend mere financial success by cementing itself in the minds of consumers everywhere, something so culturally ubiquitous it would be decades (approximately ten) before another toy had a similar impact. Industry people called a plaything of such mythical status a “100-Year Toy.”

Suntanned execs returned from vacation, anxious about the Q1 numbers. And while all toy companies strive to hit a home run, it’s always dangerous to gamble on the success of a new product, given the rate of failure and the investment involved. This risk/reward dynamic made the very concept of the 100-Year Toy an almost taboo topic of discussion, reserved for quiet break-room rendezvous and hushed tones around the watercooler. Because, historically, those who’d predicted their own design would be the next hit had been catastrophically wrong, as though their haughty hubris had triggered a curse. And not only were the designers of such a failure forever personally and professionally tied to it, but the executive who confidently allocated the huge budget for its development usually spent his or her last long drive home from work figuring out how to tell the kids, “We’re selling the boat. Also, we aren’t doing Christmas this year because I got fired.”

MiniMan™ was, fortunately for Tag Masterson and the execs who signed off on the concept, more than a seasonal hit. It was a multi-holiday Grand Slam. Every child got one for Christmas, and the tears of children who didn’t get one poured in torrents upon their own crude drawings of MiniMan™.

The MiniMan™ craze continued long after the Christmas shopping season, driving Q2, and Q3 numbers skyward. Line graphs resembled the Himalayas. For the Q4 meeting, a conference room with extra tall ceilings was required to accurately depict the stratospheric profits of TopFunToy. When interpreted via pie chart, MiniMan™ relinquished miniscule market share to the competition; slices so narrow that, had they been cut from actual pies, the flavors of other toys would have been virtually imperceptible.

Customer service was excellent, with timely replacement of unresponsive or otherwise faulty MiniMen, and product distribution was efficient and prompt. MiniMan™ could be delivered to your home via soft-impact drone drop, often within an hour of purchase, depending on location and weather. Included with each purchase was a quality polycarbonate enclosure, a basic mini-gym workout station, and an illustrated manual for maximizing the life and health of MiniMan™. It was enough to get started but, as with most products, the real money was in the add-ons, the upsells, the endless improvements and accessories with which one could augment the standard MiniMan™ habitat. Another thing that set MiniMan™ apart from other mass-produced toys, was the individual uniqueness of every unit shipped. This was a game-changing concept never previously achieved by a toy company. The closest anyone had come was Coleco Industries’ 1982 rollout of the Cabbage Patch Doll. Between combinations of hair style, hair color, eye color and clothing options, there were so many variations you’d never see the same doll twice. Each had his or her own unique name and “adoption papers,” which cleared a path for the implementation of another genius marketing strategy and blatant money grab. In a scheme that bordered on juvenile emotional exploitation, young little mommy-children could have their doll’s name and/or date of birth changed by convincing their own real-life mommy to pay a fee to Coleco Industries who would, with a few keystrokes, make the requested changes within the official authoritative Cabbage Patch identification database. While the Cabbage Patch Doll pushed up bumper crop numbers for Coleco Industries, it was at best a “half-century” class product that failed to cultivate anything resembling what MiniMan™ would do for TopFunToy.

What nobody, not even senior TopFunToy executives, knew was that MiniMan™ owed its success not to a marketing strategy, but to something much bigger, a true paradigm shift in the field of applied physics. It just so happened that a few of the brightest minds on Planet Earth had been hired by TopFunToy, and one of those hires was Tag Masterson, self-described genius who’d spent three uneventful years at the company before managing to support that claim.

*****

            Jack considered himself well-adjusted, when it came to balancing the things in life older Americans constantly hassled people his age about. The standard line went something like, “People nowadays don’t even know how to interact with other humans, because they’ve been staring at screens since birth.”

Like everyone else his age, Jack couldn’t remember a day without having a device in his hand. He’d never gone to bed without posting something important, or scrolling for an hour or so, often struck by everyone else’s posts’ lack of importance. The reason he felt well-adjusted (a term his therapist reiterated during their weekly virtual sessions), was because he went out of his way to do old-fashioned things other people his age didn’t even know people used to do. And he didn’t do them in that attention-seeking, performative way either, like when a hipster brings a typewriter to a coffee shop, or when the host of a dinner party makes a call from a vintage rotary telephone mounted on the kitchen wall next to a paper calendar on which past and upcoming events are written, in cursive, with a ballpoint pen.

Take banking, for example. Most people Jack’s age didn’t even know which president was on the dollar bill, because everyone used mobile apps to move their money around. Jack preferred the ritual of personally watching his hard-earned cash and checks go into the bank, and the satisfaction of taking money out when he needed it. He loved watching a teller count the bills so fast, peeling them off almost violently, but with the precise control of a Vegas blackjack dealer, then sliding them into a crisp white envelope and handing them over with a smile. His fondest memories of early childhood were trips to the bank with his mother. They would often use the drive-through, and from the backseat, Jack loved watching his mom hit the call button to summon the woman behind the glass some twenty or thirty feet away, depending on which lane they were in, to hit her own button. He loved the incongruity of seeing her lips move as her voice crackled robotically through the speaker, always either way too loud, or so quiet she had to repeat herself several times. The teller would hit her own button which generated a sucking, whirring noise followed by a POP, at which point a clear cylindrical object would zip through a clear tube, up and over toward him. It reminded him of the gerbils he’d seen racing through yellow plastic tubes at the pet store. In a flash, the cylinder would hit a downward-pointing curve and, at the very last second, decelerate gently into the box with the speaker and the buttons. Then a door would open, revealing the clear cylinder, now horizontal and sliding out several inches toward his mom’s hand. Jack imagined what great thought and mechanical engineering had gone into designing a system that presented the cylinder with such precision and ergonomic convenience, the way an important tool might be delivered into the gloved hand of an astronaut making an emergency repair on a spaceship.

Jack’s mom would open the cylinder from one end and remove a single, narrow form, on which she would write some numbers and sign her name, before returning it to the teller. Jack loved watching the other customers’ tubes zip back and forth like a bunch of busy little money gerbils. He wondered about their withdrawals and their deposits. He wondered what kind of jobs they had. Sometimes he’d see kids in the cars next to him but they never seemed to care what was going on. They were looking at their devices or yelling about something or getting yelled at so their mom could concentrate on her transaction.

As an adult, Jack went to the bank on Saturdays to deposit his paycheck. Most people who didn’t use mobile apps used the ATM. So few customers went into the bank anymore, there was only one teller, and that person sometimes went an entire shift without helping a single customer. Jack didn’t mind getting out of his car and walking fifty feet into the bank. Walking was another old-fashioned tradition he favored. 

One Saturday, as Jack parked and got out of his old blue pickup truck, he noticed the building next door to the bank had a new sign above it that read, “Mike’s Storage,” with a tagline that read, “When you can’t have it around but can’t let it go.” The building, once a popular grocery store, had sat vacant for many years, after losing virtually all their business to DFD (daily fresh drop) food delivery drones. The front windows had been replaced by dozens of blue metal rollup doors of various widths. Jack hadn’t noticed the transformation, and wondered how long it had been there.

Since banks were usually only staffed with a single teller, even branches in low-crime neighborhoods like Jack’s had become easy targets for robbers. It was common to go through a security checkpoint at the door, and Jack had never given it a second thought, nor did he think it strange there was a new guy working security today.

“Brian has the day off, huh?” Jack asked the guard.

“Car keys and wallet in the tray please, sir,” was all the new guy said.

“No problem,” Jack said with a smile. “I know the routine.”

Jack put his keys and wallet in the tray, and took two steps through the metal detector. He took another step, raising his right arm to retrieve his items from the tray, while looking past the guard who hadn’t introduced himself, toward the teller windows. He noticed there was no one sitting in the chair where Stephanie, who always smiled at and greeted Jack by name, usually sat on Saturday mornings. In the same moment, Jack felt his hair fly upward as his shirt billowed up around his armpits. His stomach came up into his throat. He had fallen. He was still falling . . .  accelerating . . .  into darkness.

*****

Six months ago, when Mike heard about people making crazy money in the personal storage business, he was skeptical, as any entrepreneur should be when something sounds too good to be true. All he’d need was a large building that required minimal structural changes. There was no large staff to pay, no water bills, and no other exorbitant utility costs since the lights only go on when customers show up to access their units. Best of all, he could run his other business out of the old grocer’s office inside. He needed a new security guard though. The first guy worked out great for a while, but he was too chatty. And way too nosey.

 Mike heard the beep-beep-beeping of a truck backing up in the parking lot. He stood up from his desk without looking out the office window, because he knew who it was. The Saturday truck was always exactly on time.

The driver opened the rear door of the white box truck he’d backed up to one of the storage units. Mike unlocked and rolled up the blue metal door, as he nodded pleasantly to the driver, who nodded back.

A dozen or so boxes were stacked inside, which Mike transferred to the edge of the open truck, as the driver arranged them in neat rows on the floor. After the doors were closed and the truck pulled away, Mike walked back toward the building. He was about to go inside when a voice called out.

“Yo, Mike!”

It was the security guard from the bank next door. He was at the wheel of Jack’s old blue pickup truck.

“I got another one for ya!”

“Pull it around to door fifteen,” Mike said.

Back in his office, Mike used a key to unlock and open a tall cabinet near his desk. Inside was a vertical, six-inch diameter tube extending up from the floor, through circular cutouts in the shelves. At eye level, the tube had been cut and hinged, so a section could swing open. Mike flipped a leavered clasp, releasing a hiss of pressurized air. He opened it, revealing another small tube inside, the kind Jack used to watch the teller zip over to his mother at the drive-through bank. Inside that tube was Jack, miniaturized, frantically waving his little arms around, his face pressed against the plastic, on which his desperate screams formed a silver-white bloom of condensation.

Mike set the tube containing Jack on the top shelf next to a tube containing Stephanie, the teller who normally works on Saturdays. She looked at Jack, as Jack looked over at a third tube to see Brian, the security guard who used to work at the bank, then quit to work for Mike, who never would tell Brian what the deal was with the guys in the white trucks, or the used cars Mike was selling, or what was in the boxes they were loading up.

Photo of Michael E. O’Reilly

BIO: Michael E. O’Reilly is a car hauler living outside Detroit, Michigan, and a graduate of University of Utah’s MFA Creative Writing program. He has published nonfiction books with Globe Pequot and TwoDot presses. He has also worked as a screenwriter and published fiction, journalism, literary criticism, poetry, and interviews in various magazines. He is currently writing a collection of short stories.