The Telavenger

I am heading back to JKT in a few days and I can’t wait. It has been 3 months since I was home and I saw my nephews. I mentioned before that I am heading back to spend their 5th birthday with them so I will only be there for the weekend. But that’s good enough, better then nothing. We are having a superheroes party for them, I am gonna dress up as the bad guy. So I went to one of the numerous markets here in Guangzhou this weekend looking for toys to take back for the boys. It was Saturday morning and I was way too hung-over from the night before, but at least toys are fun and I was out of the office. A lot of the toys here are pretty cool because they are over stock of production for the US market so the quality is pretty good too. But there are some items you come across here that are just too American. Like waaaaay too American. Take for example the TELAVENGER.

This here is a product that MUST have been conceived through the mind of some tripped out American teenager. How could anyone realistically design and mass produce a stuffed doll whose sole function it is to seek revenge upon telemarketers? They had to have made a shit load of these to make them cost effective so who is supposed to go out and spend good money on a product like this? The Telavenger is designed to be positioned by your phone so that when a telemarketer calls your house you can press The Telavenger’s belly and he will play one of a variety of recordings he has been programmed with to waster the time of and irritate the telemarketer who called you. Like I said I was a bit hungover that morning so I filmed the bastard sideways. Apparently he has 4 different recordings, but I only got one before the shop owner told me to bugger off.

I can just picture some stoners sitting around who just received a call from a telemarketer, the fifth one of the day, and he turns to his buddy passing over the joint and says, ‘Dude, we should like make a machine that would like answer the phone when these telemarketers call. And then like when they start selling shit, the machine would like talk shit back to them and like waste their time dude.’ And the other guy would say, ‘yeah bro, fuck those telemarketers man. They’re a buzz kill dawg. This machine should like kick their ass bro!’ And then the third says, ‘Fuck yeah man! Those fuckers have been messin with our shit way to long dawg. We gotta avenge ourselves bra!’ Then the first one says, ‘Hell yeah bro! We can make a robot like Optimus Prime, except he would only kill telemarketers. We could call him The Telavenger dude!!!’ So somehow these champions sell their idea, make shit loads of money, and move to Jamaica. I am still here in China.