When I was fourteen years old, I suddenly found myself in need of some extra spending money.

I was too young to work at the local Starbucks and too sheltered to build my own international drug cartel, so I turned to the only form of employment that was available to me at the time: babysitting.

Because this is not a face that anyone will trust with two million dollars’ worth of narcotics and a gun with a filed-off serial number. 

Right from the beginning, I had an easy time landing babysitting jobs. For starters, I’d gone out and gotten all the first-aid certificates that any anxious parent would want their hired baby-wrangler to have. Secondly, I lived in an almost comically suburban area, and I was surrounded by working professionals who needed sitters for their 2.5 kids. And finally – and perhaps most importantly – I was the living, breathing personification of the over-eager babysitter from The Incredibles.

Braces and all.

I was used to fielding calls from desperate parents who were one missed date night away from leaving their kids at the fire station, so I didn’t think much of it when a frazzled-sounded woman called me up to ask if I would babysit her two young sons.

I also didn’t think much of it when she warned me that the boys were “a bit of a handful”, because I lived in an ultra-sheltered upper-middle-class neighbourhood where people had wildly different expectations of their children. “He’s really acting out lately, we have no idea what to do with him” might simply mean “our son got a 98% on his last math test when we were expecting a perfect score”, while “she’s a really great kid, we’ve never had any issues with her” might mean “our daughter is currently dismembering a small woodland animal behind the shed in our backyard”.

The two boys that I was to babysit were five and seven years old. They had a one-week gap between the end of the school year and the day that their parents could ship them off to summer camp in the far-flung reaches of the wilderness where they belonged, and it was my job to keep them from maiming each other during that week while their parents were at work. On the off-chance that either of them ended up growing into a functional adult human being and not a feral man-beast that lives among the bears, I will be calling them Frick and Frack to protect their identities. 

 I showed up early on the first morning of the babysitting gig to go over the ground rules with the boys’ parents. Again, this was a neighbourhood of hyper-vigilant, peanut-free helicopter parents, so I was accustomed to being told things like the precise hour and minute that I was to dispense the vegan, gluten-free snacks, and the exact amount of Baby Einstein that I needed to put on in order to give little Heavenleigh a real shot at Harvard. 

So in hindsight, it was a red flag that the only three rules these parents had for me were “do your best”, “help yourself to the ‘adult’ jello in the back of the fridge”, and “for the love of every god who ever heard the anguished prayers of mankind, do not let our children separate you from your copy of the house key”. 

Then they wished me good luck and fled out the door. 

When the parents leave the house, there is always a moment when the children and the babysitter size each other up for the first time. The children analyze the babysitter to see if she’s the fun type of babysitter who will let them eat cookies for dinner, or if she’s the mean type of babysitter who will lock them in dog kennels and end up on the news. At the same time, the babysitter carefully scrutinizes her charges to make sure that she has been tasked with caring for real human offspring, and not small demons who are planning to spit pea soup in 360 degree arcs and crab-walk backwards out of the television set.

Both are usually disappointed. 

I stared at the boys. 

The boys stared back at me. 

They seemed pretty normal to me. 

I seemed pretty normal to them. 

And so I made the fatal mistake of letting my guard down.

What a fool I was.

Once the boys had decided that I probably wasn’t going to march them upstairs to perform a live reenactment of Flowers in the Attic, they indicated in no uncertain terms that they demanded popcorn. I say “indicated” and not “said”, because this was not a well-articulated request; the two of them began to pace in a circle while rhythmically chanting “Popcorn. Popcorn. Popcorn. Popcorn,” as if they were making an appeal to a pig head mounted on a spike. 

I’ve read so many books in quarantine, it’s just literary references instead of jokes from now on.

Before I could explain to the boys that popcorn was not on the Canada Safety Council Babysitter’s Training Course list of recommended foods to feed a child at 8:30 in the morning, they scrambled off to the kitchen and began yanking pieces of a hot air popcorn popper out of the cupboards like they were wolves scattering dismembered pieces of carrion. 

Now, I was not at all familiar with hot air poppers at that particular moment in my life. My father is a lifelong aspiring forest hermit, and he had conditioned me to believe that the only acceptable way to make popcorn was to cook it in a metal container on a stove top while shaking your head in quiet disdain at people who use any other method. Burning the popcorn was a sign of weakness. Hot air poppers were a sign of weakness. Microwaves were a sign of weakness. My father would regularly serve us campfire-style Jiffy Pop that he’d cooked perfectly on the stove burner, presumably just because it made him feel like a man. 

The bits of machinery that the boys were scattering across their parents’ clean floor might as well have been bits of an Apollo moon lander as far as I was concerned, and I quickly realized that letting the boys ping bits of hot corn off of every stainless steel appliance in the family kitchen was probably not a great strategy if I wanted to get hired back. I told the boys that popcorn would have to wait until that afternoon, once I’d had a chance to Google the correct user’s manual or make the necessary animal sacrifice required to make the hot air popper work. 

The boys seemed to accept this, and the older one, Frick, wandered off to play a violent video game with a large letter M printed on the cover. While he was busy learning some troubling lessons about property crime and gender relations, his brother quickly became bored. Frack tugged on my sleeve and asked if I would play with him until his brother had finished murdering every prostitute on a digital city block; I agreed, and he scrambled off to his room to get his favourite toy, returning three minutes later with a Furby in hand. 

One of these.

For those of you who managed to avoid all children’s advertising from 1998 through 2018, a Furby is a single human soul trapped inside a mechanical dancing owl. When you first bring them home, they speak a gibberish language that I can only assume is the confused wailing of a lost spirit no longer tethered to the cosmos. Over time, they learn simple English phrases like “tell me a story” and “where is the light?” as they beg you to help them remember what it is to live in a human form. They sometimes rock back and forth in a mockery of dancing as they try to wrench themselves from their fake-fur-and-plastic prisons, and other times they will pretend to sleep, making loud snoring sounds to lull you into a false sense of security. 

But Furby does not sleep. 

Furby merely waits. 

Unfortunately for Frack, this Furby really was asleep – its batteries were dead. He set it on the table and it stared at us through half-open eyes, the black sensor on its forehead a window into an endless past when mankind was still just a handful of stardust scattered across an unfeeling void. 

Frack did not agree with my suggestion that we bury the Furby in the backyard while it was still incapacitated, and insisted that he wanted me to change the battery. Like every other toy for young children that contains delicious, lickable batteries, the Furby has a battery compartment that is held shut with a small screw and cannot be popped open by tiny hands alone. I took the house key from my pocket and tried to gently twist the screw open, but it was no use – I needed a proper Phillips head screwdriver if I was going to bring this fuzzy, beaked succubus back to life. 

Frack had been watching me carefully as I tried to perform surgery with a house key, and when it was clear that I had failed, he piped up in his tiny four-year-old voice. 

“Need scwewdwiver,” he said, because he was a preschool-aged child who still wasn’t totally sure about this letter ‘r’ business. 

“I do,” I said, confirming that his carpentry knowledge was surprisingly sound for a child his age.

“Dad has some,” he said. “In the gawage. Over thewe.”

He gestured to the door of the attached garage like he was pointing out  where I might find the Arc of the Covenant. 

“And we really need to do this right now?” I asked. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Alright then,” I said, rising from my chair with knees that were still ten years away from developing an audible crackling sound when I stood. “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

And then I walked into the garage, leaving the Furby and the house key on the table behind me, because I am a fool. 

I would absolutely be the first to die in a horror movie.

Frack wasted absolutely no time. I hadn’t even made it to the bottom of the garage steps when he lunged for the door and slammed it behind me, sliding the deadlock into place in one fluid motion. I had been there for half an hour and I was already locked in a stranger’s garage with no keys, while the boys I was supposed to be responsible for had free reign of the house. I could hear both of them cackling through the door, and I knew that I would have nothing to depend on but my own wits to get me back into the house.

These have not generally served me well.

Fortunately, I had something the boys did not – namely, a basic understanding of municipal zoning. We both lived in the same brand-new subdivision, and families who’d bought lots in the subdivision had been made to choose from a handful of cookie-cutter home designs by the developer. As it so happened, my parents and the boys’ parents had the exact same taste in two-story, Desperate Housewives-esque three-bedroom family homes, because our houses were identical, right down to the matching newel posts and equally squeaky basement stairs.

And so I knew for a fact that there was a hidden side door behind a stack of plywood in the family’s garage. The side door was the only way I could enter the locked and fenced backyard, where I could hopefully make my way in through the house’s back door. It was my only hope.

The family had stockpiled enough wood to build a medium-sized jousting arena and stacked it all against the side door to the garage, presumably because unblocked fire exits are for squares. By the time I’d actually dug through it and cleared a path to the door, my hands both looked and felt like two splintery hedgehogs, but I made my way out the side door and through the backyard. For the first time since I’d arrived that morning, something went according to plan – the back door was unlocked. 

I burst through the back door and into the house like a Kool-Aid man filled with raspberry-flavored vengeance. The boys seemed to be in the kitchen, where something was making a noise like a vacuum cleaner trying to suck the motor out of an RC car. They looked up at me as I entered, wide-eyed; in that moment, they were Ebeneezer Scrooge and I was the Ghost of Consequences Yet to Come. 

And oh, were there consequences yet to come. 

Everyone’s least favourite ghost.

While I’d been imprisoned in the garage, hunting Narnia-style for a secret hidden door, the boys had taken the opportunity to once again get out the hot air popcorn maker and put it together in something approximating the correct order. They’d then filled it with popcorn kernels to 300% capacity, dumped several enormous globs of margarine directly into the popping chamber – instead of the designated butter chamber on top – and plugged that baby in to see what would happen. 

What happened was that by the time I got in there, the popcorn maker was billowing angry black smoke and firing hot, oily unpopped kernels at us like it was trying to gun us down on the beaches of Normandy. The entire house smelled like the inside of an oil drum garbage fire. Frick had picked up the stainless steel mixing bowl that they’d intended to collect the popcorn with, and was using it to bat flying chunks of weaponized corn into the living room, cabinets, ceiling, sink, dishwasher and his younger brother’s face. 

The boys were screaming.

The popcorn maker was screaming. 

Everyone was screaming. 

The popcorn might have been screaming too.

I fought my way to the air popper, acquiring several small and hard-to-explain injuries along the way, and managed to rip the cord out of the wall socket. Then I dropped down to the floor and shouted for the boys to take cover as the residual heat sent a few final aerial corn fighters hurtling through the kitchen. 

When the last of the pops had died down and the haze of burnt starch and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter had started to settle, we emerged from where each of us had been huddled in the fetal position and slowly stood up. 

I stared at the boys. 

The boys stared back at me. 

I informed them that they were going to march their little butts into the living room to watch the Disney Channel while I salvaged what was left of the kitchen, or I would call their parents and also launch both of them straight into the sun. 

I expected the boys’ parents to be angry when they got home that evening and learned that their children had nearly immolated the popcorn maker on my watch. To my surprise, however, they offered me a raise.

In eerily calm voices, they explained that I was the last babysitter in the entire neighbourhood who hadn’t blocked their phone number or called them in hysterics in the middle of a workday to inform them that they were on the verge of shutting both boys in the washing machine, and they were willing to make it worth my while to stay on. They needed a babysitter more than they needed functional kitchen appliances, and if the occasional hot air popper had to go to Valhalla in a fiery blaze of glory for them to have childcare, that was a price they were willing to pay – plus twenty dollars an hour. 

And that’s the story of how I landed the best-paying babysitting job I ever had.

To read more about my unfortunate interactions with children, check out my comprehensive list of all the horrible things I did to my own brothers as a child. 

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