True Story© Midget Spinners™

      Y’all remember Pogo Balls?

What about now?

For those of you who smoke too much of the Devil’s lettuce to remember or too damn lazy to click a link and be reminded, they were a toy of the 80’s where a sturdy-ass rubbery ball was stuffed securely into a disc, which would serve as a board to stand upon and jump around on like a pogo stick.  As one might imagine, many hilarious injuries would ensue.

As the significant other of a public school teacher, I am well aware of the phenomenon of Fidget Spinners and while I have not played with them as a toy, I have sold a few of them for profit and know what a fucking annoyance they are to teachers and the like.  I also wish I could have been the one to come up with the concept of them as a TOY and not what they were in their initially-intended iteration.

Jealousy will breed either hate or action, and I don’t have the energy to hate.

     Enter: Midget Spinners™!
That’s right, Midget Spinners™!

I went on Amazon and eBay, bought up EVERY Pogo Ball (AKA LoLo Ball, Spring Ball, Disc-O and some other shit) I could acquire for as cheaply as I could acquire them to prepare to exact my plan.  I would fill all of the balls with a resin that would harden and have them prepared for their new design.
Once hardened, the whole thing is attached to a tapered roller bearing and then the midget little person, child or small-stature adult would balance themselves on the board attached to the no-longer-squishy ball and instead of jumping around and eventually breaking an ankle or falling down a nearby flight of steps or into some kind of expansive chasm (don’t judge me, I watched a lot of Roadrunner cartoons and just KNEW this would be a more prominent problem as a child), the user tries to SPIN on it for as many rotations as possible.  Have fun with it, outdo your friends!  Upload your videos to FaceBook, YouTube and whatever other social networking platforms you belong to.

     I took the time to gather supplies, securing 35 of the toys and enough resin to fill them all.  I did all the work in my own home and set out about the task of filling and getting them marketed on my FB and Twitter accounts.  People were interested in the idea in general at first and I got the first ten or so off at a per-unit profit and sat on that cash before reinvesting the money back into the business.  I would let this thing take off, people post themselves playing with THEIRS on the internet and then blast off as the proprietor as the next memetic toy sensation.

BUT!!!

Did you know that midgets little people not only don’t like being called “midgets,” but gather in HUGE numbers to combat people they feel are marginalizing them?  My use of the word in this application was innocent, I had clearly marketed this as a children’s apparatus and many of us have lovingly referred to our kids as ‘midget’ and don’t mean so with anything less than love.  That said, I never said out loud in the marketing campaign that the boards would be used by midgets little people, I specifically used language suggesting children and the type of adults who would have small-enough feet and low-enough body weights, never using a pejorative term in the direction of the marketing.

Maaaaaaaannnn…
I get to work to an email that I had ignored on my commute, it was from the Midget Little Person’s Anti-Defamation League basically threatening to throw all kinds of shit on my name and business entities if I didn’t IMMEDIATELY cook up a new name for my product AND apologize for what I had done.
I am also an asshole.
“This is but a tiny little problem, what could they POSSIBLY do to me?  I ain’t changing shit!”
They could do exactly what the fuck they SAY they would do.  I had no idea that a group representing less than 2% of the population could rally up and ruin my dealings so fast!

My name was on the news, all over Twitter and FaceBook, motherfuckers I don’t even KNOW calling my phone and hanging up or leaving me voicemails in these tiny cartoonish little, but weirdly post-pubescent, voices.  I was scared.  Worse still was the fact that NO ONE wanted to buy Midget Spinners™ anymore!  $1300 invested, with hardware and supplies compared to enough sales to have made a hair over half of that back with two-thirds of my inventory to sell.  Until I could get back to two-thirds of inventory shifted, I had taken a loss on these things.

There just wasn’t another catchy name to append to them, “Midget Spinner™” was that magic moment, the once-in-a-lifetimeseason chance to be “it,” and I was so caught up in my perceived harmlessness of the name that I screwed myself out of my moment.

Anybody wanna buy a Midget Spinner™?