Fuzzy Face...

‘Thank you for holding your call is still in queue and you will be answered shortly.’

How many times do you have to hear that before you give up? I waited in all day for the insurance assessor to contact me as promised and when he didn’t I decided that I’d contact them as suggested by the Insurance company.

We all know what comes next.

‘Thank you for holding your call is still in queue and you will be answered shortly.’

Still it gave me time off from bucketing out water from our flooded cellar and allowed me a few minutes to play with my stocking filler ‘Fuzzy Face’.

Does anybody else remember this toy? I used to have one as a kid, although I’d forgotten just how frustrating it was. Basically it’s just a picture of a face under some perspex with a magnetic pencil that picks up iron filings so that you can decorate the face with fuzz. Hair, beards, moustaches, eyebrows, anything is possible – if only you could get that stylus to do its job well enough.

I’d say that Fuzzy Face is up there with my Etch-a-Sketch in the frustration stakes, along with those systems for making enlargement drawings using a wooden frame and a pencil, and of course those impossible ‘get the ball in the holes’ dexterity puzzles that came in Christmas crackers and used to drive me mad.

It’s the sort of toy that after three minutes you want to stop using but can’t, after five minutes you want to smash by stamping your foot on it but don’t, and after ten minutes want to get the better of and master.

At eighteen minutes and dozens of ‘Thank you for holdings’ later, just as I was about to give up on the call and just as I was also about to give up with my Fuzzy Face picture, I got through.

‘How can I help you?’

‘Any chance you can tell me how to make a Fuzzy Face moustache that doesn’t look like a blob?’