Hacker News Reader

Comment by solresol | Hacker News Reader

The other day I accidentally left my son at a busy station in Tokyo. He was more annoyed than upset. He just found the right platform to go home and planned to email me when he got back to say where he was.

We underestimate children's ability to navigate, which is silly because if they were really bad at it our species would have died out long ago.

View on HN

How do you accidentally leave your son at a train station in Tokyo ?

There were 8 of us because my daughter's old school friend's family was here on holidays. They speak a Chinese dialect that I don't speak well.

Anyway it was like herding sheep to get them anywhere. In the rush to get them onboard a train where we taking them back to their hotel from a shopping trip... well... I kinda left my youngest on the platform.

I know it looks ridiculous but if you are in charge of a gang of kids put them in the brightest eye-burning tee shirts you can find.

You won't even have to look at their dirty, disgusting faces, just count them like cattle.

In a large city like NYC, neon-green would stands out very nicely.

Sounds foolproof, right? Well, let me introduce you to my town, where each of the tourist groups had this very same bright (sorry) idea. As the textile is mass-produced and apparently highly standardized, this results in streets being awash in ~8 hues of nigh-identical neon t-shirts (yellow, green, orange x2 each, red, blue). Now, which one, out of the sea of identical SCREAMING colors was yours? Yup, Red Queen Principle - back to square 1.

That’s funny, glad he did just fine. How old, if you don’t mind? The emailing you bit cracks me up - kids are just mini adults.

Yep - as long as one treats them as such.

Agreed. I talk to my 2 y.o. son in a normal tone with full sentences, respect, and he seems to appreciate it. I can tell when my mom talks to him like a baby that he gets annoyed, it’s unfortunately amusing.

I was partway through writing a comment in reply when I noticed I was actually writing an essay: https://aaron-m.com/2017/12/17/small-travelers-in-an-antique...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com