Now that Christmas approaches, I’m thumbing through the catalogues for presents to give my young descendents.

What’s this?

“Time to go to work! Children will feel so grown up having a day at the office with this 75 piece set, includes a write-and-wipe laptop and meeting board, play glasses, play watch, working calculator, play stapler, play mobile phone, even a mug and a doughnut, plus much more! Age 3 and above.”

Hmm. Barring the plastic doughnut, it all seems a bit unreal. We ought to do something about that.

“Buy Phil Factor’s IT fun-pack! Children will thrill to the stress of the life of an IT developer with this, the ultimate pretend IT department. Encourage work-readiness and negative feelings about work through role-play of workday routines.

All kids will love our pointy-headed boss costume. They’ll use their imagination to pretend not to understand the technical issues, get hoodwinked by any passing IT salesmen, and change their minds about development strategies. Fun for all the family as the tactile and colourful toy database develops page faults and requires a restore from the last known good backup, which was accidentally deleted last week.

Throw a dice to see who’ll experience our hilarious plastic blue-screen-of-death. All the kids will love to dress up and play the office Unix Guru in sandals, beard and bottle glasses who goes on and on about Ubuntu, Ruby on rails, Mandriva and Perl. You’ll laugh when your friends dress up as the bad-tempered DBA, and charge around accusing developers of making changes directly into production databases.

Recreate the joys of the open-office area, where developers with the concentration-span of goldfish talk loudly about footie, or laugh like hyenas for no apparent reason! Thrill to our cardboard blank-screen when you lose an hour’s work after a wandering geek trips over your power cables. Thrill to the competition to see just how many LCD screens you can have on your desktop at once. Last one to get two screens loses!

As a change from the usual pillowfight during a sleep-over, try our toy powerpoint presentations! Dress up in a charcoal suit and send them all to sleep with bullet-points. Last one awake is a swot! ”

Ah me. I shudder and have a quick look at what young geeks got up to in 1913. The Boy Mechanic, published in Chicago in 1913 was extolling play with model steam engines or turbines, Flint arrowheads, Electric toasters, Toboggan sleds, Magic spirit hands, self-lighting arc searchlights, Fish signals for fishing through ice, toy cannons that actually fired, . Homemade shower baths, home-made bombs ignited by electricity, and home-made flying machines (‘The proper position of the body is slightly ahead of the planes, but this must be found by experience…. The operator might suffer a sprained ankle or perhaps a broken limb’).

These sort of activities and toys for children seem to be expressly designed to eliminate the unwary from the gene pool, rather than to prepare them for the alien world of the modern open-plan office. Perhaps fun at Christmas IT office parties can be had from my favorite entry in the ‘Boy Mechanic’