Some time ago my sister Sam told me about a website I’d never heard of before. I may be late to the party and you and every man and his bone has already heard of it… but maybe not.
“It’s awful,” Sam cringed, “you type in the country you live in, your parents’ ages and the average amount of times you see them a year.”
“Yeah… and what? It tells you what a slack arse daughter you are?” I asked swallowing in guilt, trying to recall the last time I called the oldies.
“No,” she murmured in a hushed tone. “It tells you how many more times you’re likely to see them before they die. It’s worked out using national statistics and life expectancy.”
‘A bit morbid,’ I thought. ‘I’ll be steering clear of that gloomy harbinger.”
But just like the curious box that allured the wayward Pandora, the site of macabre mystery beckoned me and before I knew it I was typing the details into the text box on the site.
I can’t reveal the actual figure it displayed as occasionally my father reads this blog (only to provide him with further evidence his eldest daughter is indeed an idiotic time-waster) so let’s just think of an arbitrary figure.
Imagine the result was eight times; I’d see my parents eight more times before they drove the grey nomad trailer up to the stars towards a celestial eternity of lawn bowls, All Bran and bickering over the speed limit.
Eight more times certainly doesn’t seem like much does it?
But what are you supposed to do? You can’t suddenly start dropping in on them all the time. If you decided to visit them once a month instead of the usual annual trip you’d dramatically cut their life expectancy by years.
I don’t think they’d be too impressed with that.
I guess you could leave the eighth visit as an undetermined mythological date in the future thus ensuring your parents lived forever… but then you’d never see them again anyway.
Or you could space out the visits to every five years guaranteeing them both living well into their one hundred and thirties. But isn’t that defeating the purpose of the site i.e., encouraging progeny to be more attentive towards their elderly parents in their dotage.
Whatever the solution is, I don’t know.
But if my father does read this post I’m pretty sure his next Google search will be,
“How many more times do I have to see my brainless daughter, Pinky again before I finally find peace in perpetuity?”
I guess you could leave the eighth visit as an undetermined mythological date in the future thus ensuring your parents lived forever… but then you’d never see them again anyway.
Or you could space out the visits to every five years guaranteeing them both living well into their one hundred and thirties. But isn’t that defeating the purpose of the site i.e., encouraging progeny to be more attentive towards their elderly parents in their dotage.
Whatever the solution is, I don’t know.
But if my father does read this post I’m pretty sure his next Google search will be,
“How many more times do I have to see my brainless daughter, Pinky again before I finally find peace in perpetuity?”