We now know Ball Pit Man's secret identity.

I'm always afraid my ball pit might have cobras in it so I hired a crack team of specialists to handle the problem.

We have an empty rock-pool feature in the entrance to one of our warehouses. We've been in discussions on what to do with it for a couple of months. Some silly idea's are to get the water feature going again, or fill it with plants, or have a lighting display. My proposal has been to fill it with ball-pit balls.

The ball-pit idea has a lower running cost, than the other 3 ideas.
The lights and plants have already been rejected.
Water is a slip hazard, rejection is immanent.
My idea has not yet been rejected. Padding modifications are cheap, already have the quotes.

We are still in discussions.
There WILL be balls!

(also, not a joke)

Dudes, shut up. There's a ball pit in the center of their conference room table! Every office should have one of those!

Just before he said "Jesus", my answer was "Christopher Hitchens". Now that would have been an interesting conversation to have in a ball pit.

Thanks legacy

In reply to this comment by legacy0100:
*promote

>> ^robbersdog49:

I went to a school where bullying was just a fact of life. The normal advice you got was to stand up to bullies. It doesn't work. This video is a real one off. If this had happened at my school the big kid who stepped up at 0:27 would have kicked the shit out of the fat kid.


Exactly so. Forget everything you know (or think you know) about why kids bully. We used to think that it was insecure kids seeking to tear down kids that are even MORE insecure, and that the bullying was a consequence of problems at home, etc.

The problem was that all the federal dollars that went towards studying the problem looked at juvenile delinquents, who, as you might imagine, have messed up home lives and self-esteem issues. Even though all the populations studied were far from random, the view that bullies have antisocial tendencies predominated.

Then Columbine happened. Despite what you might think of Kleibold and Harris, they were in fact bullied, and not by kids from broken homes. The people who tormented them were from upper middle class homes with two parents and no problems. Suddenly the federal dollars manifested to study ALL children, and they discovered something astonishing (tho not to someone who'd ever been bullied):

Bullies bully because it works. And we teach them this at a very early age. How? Imagine one of those "paygrounds," with the ball pit and the curvy slides. A team studies literally thousands of interactions between children and their peers via closed circuit cameras. They watched as children who did not know one another navigated the various social networks that would form and dissolve in front of their eyes. From time to time, a kid would get socially aggressive, and the other child would seek succor from an adult. Now the adult probably has the belief that "they have to work it out for themselves," and so must make a choice between intervening and not. Otherwise, children learn to 'tattle', to recruit a heavy (in the form of an adult) to get his or her way, right.

So, out of, say, ten of these instances, how many times has the aggrieved child made an earnest effort to negotiate on a peer level, and actually needs an adult for intervention? 1 time? Half the time? Try 9 times out of ten. And almost always, the adult rebuffs the child. So this teaches the socially aggressive child that he or she can do whatever he or she pleases, and no one will come to the aid of their victim. Welcome to the Serengeti, children. It's as if we never left.

So what's to be done? As a teacher, I've thought about it a lot. First, I ALWAYS intervene. This means that 10% of the time, I fall for sheer crap-weasel-ness, but that only works once. If another intervention is needed, I keep an eye on the petitioner, and if he or she's becoming an instigator, it's time for a little time out, usually with no explanation (until after class is over). The next is to muck with the social dynamic. I control the environment in the room, not the students. They can interact with each other as much as they want, but I control all the mundane things that add up to so much in the long run.

What this kid was demonstrating in this video was the Ender Wiggins's School of Social Dynamism, which is that if you show yourself capable of great rage that can be tightly controlled, people will give you a wide berth. Is it right? I don't know how long the bullying had occurred, nor what measures had been instituted to resolve the problem. If it's the average American school, 1) too long, and 2) not enough.

Oh, and don't forget the role of the other crap-weasels in this video--the instigators with the cameraphone. Like the now infamous Epic Old Man video, the 'videographer' talked a lot of smack, and failed to help in any way. They too need to be punished for aiding to an atmosphere where such an outcome was likely. Luckily, someone was stupid enough to make a recording of exactly what they were saying.

This is like seeing your great-grandma dragged through a ball pit by Napolean Bonaparte.

Just so long as you damned atheists don't take my place of worship (the ball pit at IKEA) away.