Gone…in a Flash

Remember ‘flash mobs?’ They were a big deal amongst the younger, computer-connected set awhile back. For those of you who missed this phenomenon, ‘flash mobs’ involved individuals assembling at a designated public place, doing something random and then dispersing.

Frankly, I didn’t understand what the big deal was. My family had been flash mobbing me long before it became a ‘thing’.

Take family dinners, for example. From out of nowhere my husband and children would converge around the table, randomly suck down food, belch conversation and then almost instantly disperse, usually leaving me, fork poised in mid-air, still waiting to take my first bite.

A variation on this also would occur around the pantry which, I’ll modestly say, contained some of the finest examples of junk food available. At random times during the day all the neighborhood children would gather at the pantry. A buzzing much like locusts would be heard, followed by a flurry of hands and then the little patter of feet as this version of a flash mob quickly dispersed.

Part of the art of flash mobbing, if you will, involved being able to motivate a group of people to perform these “random acts”. I became quite adept at chumming flash mobs of children. Much like setting out a plate of food will attract flies, I put out a bag of un-inflated balloons and, in short order, I had a mob of children around my garden hose itching for a water balloon fight. I once found a refrigerator box, threw it on the front lawn and got a pack of children as tenants.

Just like fishing, there’s some bait that won’t work to attract a mob. In fact, some things can be classified as flash mob ‘repellents.’ For example, my entire family and several of their friends can be gathered in front of the television cheering a playoff game. But like some kind of super genetically engineered bats, their sonic ears hear the whisper click of the dishwasher timer indicating that it’s time to be unloaded. Suddenly I become the lone guy in the stadium moving a push broom through peanut casings.

It’s the same thing with laundry. At the beep of the dryer my family can go from zero to three blocks away in sixty seconds.

So don’t tell me about mobs of people berating their spoons in a shopping mall food court or shouting lines from famous plays in front of a theatre complex. I’m unimpressed. After all, imagine the flash mob I can attract with a pile of dirt and a garden hose.