CANADA – Businesses across the nation are reporting that this year’s most popular Father’s Day gift is a nondescript cardboard box filled with gears and wires of various sizes that retails for $29.95.
“It’s perfect,” sobbed Keith Bakri, one of the lucky fathers who received a shoebox containing several randomly-sized gears and both insulated and uninsulated wires. “I promise I’ll tinker with it everyday.”
After Amazon and other online stores immediately sold out of the assorted machine parts, brick-and-mortar shop owners say that lines of children and spouses formed around the block. Online reviews of the product are uniformly excellent, with many fathers saying that the box is “neat” and “will probably be useful around the house”.
“I figured I owed it to him after I put my foot down about restoring a rusted 1983 Corvette in our driveway,” said wife and lawyer Sheila Broadside. “But you know what? If he shows he can take care of these gears and wires then maybe he’s ready to dick around with an old car.”
Retailers say that part of the excitement can be attributed to viral posts on popular dad-issues forums, including one in which a father proved that one of his older gears might have been from a Sherman tank, possibly. But despite the gift’s popularity, dad trend researchers are cautioning against investing heavily in gears and wires.
“It’s impossible to tell what dads are going to be into from year to year,” said statistician Michael Phung. “Model ships, slot car race sets, lawncare: these things are entirely unremarkable to an ordinary person. And yet at any given time dads across Canada can be seized by a sudden obsession with any, or all, of them.”
Product experts are saying that the “box-of-wires-and-gears” fad has the makings of the biggest Father’s Day hit since 1996, when “pile-of-old-2x4s” fever swept the nation.
