Have I somehow offended you?

People like to buy gifts for kids. They do. In some way, it allows us to become a child again, to peruse the aisles of toys, to dream about what you would have wanted when you were the birthday boy or girl. It's fun. I get that.

What I don't get is what I have done to some of my friends and family members to make they buy the most obnoxiously loud toys, the ones that grunt, groan, play irritating songs, have sirens roughly equivalent to an air raid siren, and above all things, cannot be turned off.

We recently opened a Christmas gift that a close friend gave my Big Dog (yes, opening Christmas gifts in September, sounds terrible, but really it just spreads the joy across the entire year!) and discovered this cute remote controlled safari truck made the most hideous noise. It is amazing how an innocent and entertaining looking toy can make such terrible sounds. It screams like a monkey, it trumpets like an elephant, it makes any number of other ungodly noises. And the finest feature of this toy is it is impossible to lower the volume or, more importantly, turn the noise off. Well, at least impossible as far as I can figure out. The bottom of the toy does have the "no sound" icon printed on the bottom, but it is on a non-moving part of the toy. A little joke by the toymaker as far as I can tell, since I have tried everything and this icon just seems to be decorative, mocking me as I suffer the screeching and howling of this toy. Why are they doing this to me? What have I ever done to them? And the bigger question, what did I do to this fried to inflict this toy upon my peace-loving household?

Naturally the kids love it. It has been in nearly constant use since we unpackaged the demon plaything. Taking it away really isn't an option either. That would just replace the screams of the safari truck with the screams of my darling children. And really, that's only worse because they can follow me from room to room and grab at my clothing. My only recourse is to endure the cacophony of sounds this toy produces while I silently plot my revenge. I swear, if Besty every has kids, she has some serious payback coming her way. If they don't already make a rattle that sounds like a chainsaw, I'll just have to invent one. Really, she deserves it.