The chocolate factory of the evil monkey mastermind.

We had to order more magnet sets to fill the orders that came in with the orders for Teraport Wars books. The magnets do not arrive at our house in neatly bagged sets. They arrive in a huge box of loose magnets. I’ve found that the best way to turn loose magnets into sets is to first stick magnets back-to-back in pairs; Biohazard/Schlock Mercenary, Corrosive Agents/Naked Singularities, High Voltage/Flammable, and Radioactive Emissions/Microwave Lasers. I then line up four stacks of pairs and put four pairs per bag. Creating the system took some thought, but the implication is boring and repetitive. So I decided to pay my kids to do it for me.

Gleek and Link have a bookfair at school next week and they wanted money to spend. So they happily sat down to start sticking magnets together. They started strong, but their enthusiasm waned after about 15 minutes. Fortunately at this point two of my backyard neighbor’s kids and Patch showed up. I set up stations for each of the kids and then I hovered over them all as a quality control officer. My neighbor’s kids thought that this was the coolest job ever. In fact, my neighbor’s 9 year old son began spouting trivia about Schlock Mercenary cartoons, complete with quoted dialog. This startled me because I’m pretty sure he knows the strip better than we do.

After awhile someone mentioned that putting the magnets together was similar to a chocolate making process that they’d watched on a How It’s Made episode. All of the magnets were instantly transformed into chocolates and the children became chocolate factory workers. But this was insufficiently interesting because they then decided that the chocolate factory was in fact owned by The Evil Monkey Mastermind (Howard). I supplied them with the word “minion” and the game was good to go. They spoke in nasal evil voices as they clipped magnets and put them in bags. They particularly liked the phrase “evil monkey mastermind” (it is fun to say, you try it) but they sometimes spoonerized it. Howard happened to walk through just as someone was saying “evil master monkeymind.” Howard objected to having the brain of a monkey and admonished the minions to get it right next time. It turns out that the way they all became minions was by eating the poisoned chocolate. After eating poisoned chocolate, you become a minion for life and have to make more chocolate to catch more minions.

The minions worked for over an hour until all the loose magnets were bagged. Then I paid them and they ran off to play while I double checked all the bags to make sure that none had duplicates. Only two bags had errors, now corrected. The minions did good work and they all begged to be able to do it again sometime because it was the best job ever.