Notbetrieb - Emergency Operation

Only once have I ever played Hasbro’s Operation in an emergency. A made-up friend at university one day banged on my door like a genuine mental, screaming that if I didn’t play with him he’d wrench out the tweezers and force them inside the next diminutive plastic person he saw. Unfortunately, a dwarf with fake tits called Carrie lived across the way, so I couldn’t in good conscience ignore him. Just in case. Okay, so I’ve never played Operation, but I’ve always loved board games. Ever the bastard little kid, I remember blubbing my eyes out in Toys R Us when my mum wouldn’t buy me Mouse Trap - instead (heartlessly) choosing to spend money on my brother’s birthday present. Of course she caved and cretinous little me got the goods anyway. I was a real shit, but had a game of zany action on a crazy contraption, so didn’t really care. My non-made-up friends at university were obsessed with Risk, and we’d routinely play till the wee hours, getting drunk and flippantly sending wave after wave of plastic triangles to their poorly-rolled-dice-determined deaths. When we weren’t killing thousands of people in a needless global power struggle, we’d enjoy similarly lengthy nights cheating each other out of ill-gotten gains on the London property market playing Monopoly. So essentially our evenings were spent learning that destroying lives physically and financially was not only fun, but necessary. It’s the western way - I’d hope for nothing less. Or more. This paragraph’s all too convoluted to tell.

Recently, however, I’ve hit a board game dry spell. The last time I remember was playing the deeply confusing Seattle version of Monopoly with a toff English twit called Tom and two girls from Orange County who had, somewhat ironically for girls from the land of massive houses, no interest in property. Once all the title deeds were sold, nobody had a complete set and nor did anyone else want to trade anything. This resulted in a meaningless hour spent swapping pittances for landing on each other’s undeveloped inner city greenbelts sites before the girls got distracted by hair, makeup and other sexist stereotypes.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly out of time and this piece has nowhere else to go. I’ve bored (ha!) myself silly and so risk (ha!) needing an emergency operation (ha!) to remove the chronic pun-secreting gland from my brain. Monopoly. Urgh.