There’s a peculiar disease that infects children somewhere between the ages of six and twelve. It’s not chickenpox or measles, though it spreads just as quickly through playgrounds and birthday parties. It’s the chronic need to establish dominance through increasingly absurd claims of material superiority.
“Our car goes faster than yours.”
“Well, our TV is in colour and yours is still black and white.”
“That’s nothing. We have a video player with a timer on it. I can record things even when I’m not at home. While you’re sitting there like some sort of medieval peasant, manually pressing buttons, I’m living in the future.”
Looking back, I’m not entirely sure what we thought we’d achieve with these declarations. A medal? Respect? The ability to sit at the cool table during lunch? Mostly we just stood there, arms crossed, nodding smugly as if we’d personally engineered the VCR timer ourselves rather than simply being born into a household that owned one.
The truly depressing revelation of adulthood is that nothing actually changes. The toys get more expensive and the boasts more sophisticated, but the playground never really ends it just relocates to the office.
I discovered this when I casually mentioned to a colleague that I ride a motorbike. It was meant to be conversational filler, the verbal equivalent of commenting on the weather. Instead, it triggered something primal.
“Oh, motorbikes?” he said, leaning back with the satisfied expression of someone about to deploy a tactical nuke in a water pistol fight. “I used to compete in motorcycle racing. Nothing serious just regional championships, a few podium finishes, that sort of thing.”
Before I could even process this information, someone from accounts piped up from across the room: “Racing’s alright, I suppose. I was a motorcycle stuntman for a famous Hollywood actor. Can’t say who, obviously. NDAs and all that. But let’s just say if you’ve seen any major action films from the 2000s, you’ve seen my work.”
I stood there, holding my instant coffee, suddenly feeling like my modest commuter bike was less a vehicle and more a child’s scooter with delusions of grandeur.
But you know what they say, apples don’t fall far from the tree.
I have a Guinness World Record certificate framed and hanging on the wall in my office. It’s for a training session I delivered on behalf of KnowBe4, something about the biggest cybersecurity awareness training delivered on YouTube or some such achievement that sounds impressive at dinner parties and those events where you’re asked to tell 2 truths and a lie about yourself. Most days, it just hangs there, quietly gathering dust and occasionally prompting confused looks from visitors who can’t quite work out if it’s real or an elaborate joke.
Then one day, my youngest asked if he could take it into school for show and tell.
I’ll admit, I was caught off guard. For once, there was something about my professional life that he actually understood and wanted to talk about. Not the technical jargon or the endless video calls with people in different time zones. Just a simple certificate that said “World Record” … it was almost touching.
He brought it back that afternoon with the expression of someone who’d just won a decisive battle.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“Pretty good,” he said, in that deliberately understated way that children use when they’re absolutely bursting to tell you something. “Some kid was flexing about how if you type his dad’s name into Google, it comes up.”
“Right.”
“So I told him that if you type your name into an AI, it knows who you are.”
I felt a small swell of pride, which was immediately followed by the parental instinct to not encourage showing off, which was then overridden by curiosity about where this was going.
“And then I said you have a Guinness World Record.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. But the teacher told me to stop exaggerating.”
Ah. The eternal curse of the truth that sounds too good to be true.
“So I brought in the certificate the next day.”
“And?”
“That shut everyone up. One of the boys asked if he could have your autograph.”
I’m not saying I’m proud that my child deployed my professional achievements as a tactical weapon. I’m just saying that it’s nice to occasionally be the cool dad… even if it’s only by proxy, and even if the coolness is from a framed piece of paper.
Javvad Malik 