{"id":275,"date":"2006-08-24T20:23:35","date_gmt":"2006-08-24T09:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/08\/24\/top-gun-of-the-airfix-force\/"},"modified":"2007-12-30T21:15:28","modified_gmt":"2007-12-30T11:15:28","slug":"top-gun-of-the-airfix-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/08\/24\/top-gun-of-the-airfix-force\/","title":{"rendered":"Top Gun of the Airfix Force"},"content":{"rendered":"

At what age did boys make model airplanes? You know the plastic Airfix<\/a> ones with the decals, and plastic cement with the noxious vapours that sticks to your fingers to make a sticky second skin that is so hard to wash off? Eight years old? Something like that. Anyway, it is a pretty young age, and I was that young when this story starts.<\/p>\n

I had already made a few model airplanes so I was pretty damn good at it – some of them, I had assembled all by myself! When it came time for a new one, I was taken to the toy store, and in keeping with my big boy status, I went to the counter myself to make the purchase.<\/p>\n

The salesman (who was probably all of 15 years old, but seemed big to me) was obviously well-skilled in upselling. While he double-checked the contents of the box containing the model parts, he saw an opportunity to sell another item: “Would you like me to put some glue in the box?” he asked.<\/p>\n

I misunderstood the question. I thought he was going to glue the box shut! That seemed a bit unnecessary for the short trip home. “Can’t you just use sticky tape?” I replied.<\/p>\n

He looked quizzically at me, and gently explained that the model needed to be assembled with special glue.<\/p>\n

At that tender age, I had never<\/em> been so mortified – it absolutely horrified me that this young sales assistant thought that I<\/em>, a top gun of model airplane assembly, was under the misapprehension that you could stick together the delicate and intricate parts with tape<\/em>. I have a vivid image in my mind of the abandoned sticky-mess result of such an attempt.<\/p>\n

My younger more-fragile ego seems so cute and sooo weird<\/em> to me now, but this incident remained deeply embarrassing to me for a long time. I still remember it clearly twenty-odd years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At what age did boys make model airplanes? At that tender age, I had never<\/em> been so mortified – it absolutely horrified me what this young sales assistant thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,35,41],"tags":[106,196],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-heroic-failures","category-story-telling","tag-anecdote","tag-childhood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}