Oh, dear.
This really will end in tears.
On a website devoted to up- and down-loading freeware and shareware, I recently encountered:
This software enables you to — and I quote, as punctuation will shortly confirm — ‘keep track of your contractions as your baby is born’.
I should like to assure any man who may read this, and particularly the man who wrote Contraction Counter, that any woman on the point of giving birth will be keeping track of her contractions. Furthermore, she is rather unlikely to be clutching a mouse.
But what if such software appeals to her caring, sharing partner? And what if it catches on in a big way? In years to come, will a woman be coiled in agony while the father-to-be is trying to configure Microsoft Birthware 2010(™)?
Actually, he’ll probably be absorbed in the game that comes with it. (It’s based on Tetris. You have to catch the babies as they drop, and get bonus points for twins.) Thus he will be completely deaf to her pleas of,
“GET ME A [insert oath of your choice] AMBULANCE BEFORE I [and another one] EXPLODE!!!!!”
Or words to that effect. Well, to no effect really, because he’s too busy trying to beat his highest score (“Bugger! another miscarriage”).
By the time she can attract his attention — because the computer has just crashed — she is on the verge of becoming somewhat slimmer, somewhat quickly, somewhat soon.
Frantically, he boots up again and multiclicks on Phone Dialler(™) which, thoroughly confused, tries to contact the baby.
Eventually, he remembers that they have a telephone and — once he has tried to track it down via Telephone Tracker(™), which somehow fails to inform him that the telephone is cowering behind the precarious stack of ‘Dummies’ guides in the compost heap of the techno-garden — almost manages to use it appropriately.
Unfortunately, he is still online and it takes him some time to resist not checking out just one more promising web site. (Boy, do they promise. And boy, is he a sucker.)
‘Shame he didn’t stick to sucking,’ she gasps, releasing a new life into the real world.
And shame, Microsoft BabyChange(™) hasn’t yet developed beyond the game that comes with it, in which you have to avoid being around to change the nappy whenever its contents are squidgy, smelly and generally unwelcome at polite dinner parties.
Five years later, Junior attracts Father’s attention by reconfiguring Contraction Counter.
That’s right. Father has spent five years and nine months — that’s 181, 008, 000 seconds, according to Microsoft TimeWaster(™) — trying to work out what to do with the afterbirth.
While Father is taking a pee, Junior removes his afterbirth from the freezer and transforms it into a piquant party dip, complete with crudit‚s. A double-click, a couple of cloves of garlic, and it’s all over for Father, who decides to retire and take up a non-computer-related hobby.
Unfortunately, the universal appeal of the Internet has ensured that there are none left. Even knitting has been Netified.
His only option, therefore, is to withdraw from society and become a devout wanker for the rest of his years, which his partner and child might have noticed if they hadn’t already left him for Microsoft PerfectWanker(™).
It could happen.
However, it is highly improbable; most guys like that never get round to having sex in the first place.