Recently, I downloaded the Opera browser to take it for a spin. This was following my disappointment in the Safari for Windows trial a week or so ago (sadly not impressed at all). There are a few things I like about Opera, and a few things I'm missing from Firefox (mainly add ons), but a strong feature I've grown fondly of in Opera are the little widgets. There's useful stuff like a weather widget, and completely non-useful-but-pretty widgets like the lava lamp. The one I really really like is the Sim Aquarium. It's a little tank that you have to 'care for' - feed the fish, watch the water pollution, give the fish meds if they get ill. The other night, I had a moment with my Sim Aquarium that reminded me of a traumatic childhood experience. You see, I had always had fish growing up. I'm not sure what the attraction was there, but I just loved having pet fish. However, my luck with fish was just non-existent. With the first fish I got, I knelt down in my bedroom, staring at my new pet with amazement and glee. Around that very second, my youngest brother, who was in his toddler years, came walking up and managed to trip over my feet. This sent him flying forward where he subsequently cracked his head on the corner of my wooden dresser. Panicked, I ran to tell my mom what happened. After shouting up the stairs to her, I turned back around to see my brother walking up behind me, his hand smearing the massive amount of blood pouring from the gash on his forehead. That image was burned in my skull forever. Up till that point, I had no idea that head wounds bled so profusely.
But I digress from the truly traumatic fish experience I've recreated with the Sim Aquarium. At one point in my childhood, I had gotten a rather nice aquarium. I went to pick out some fish and settled on some orange and black type. The clerk asked me if I wanted 2 boys and 2 girls. This seemed like a logical set-up to me, as I was clearly not thinking of the consequences of such an action. A few weeks passed until one day, as I was peering into the aquarium, I noticed teeny tiny living things in the aquarium with my four fish. I peered closer, initially thinking it was some kind of disgusting issue that I would need to clean out the tank for. I quickly realized that what I was looking at were baby fish. It was really cool at first, but soon there were more babies, and more babies, and my 10 gallon tank was suddenly home to about 40 fish. Let me tell you, the impact 40 fish has on a simple task of cleaning the fish tank is really quite tremendous. Around this time, our family vacation began to sneak up on us. Being responsible fish owners, my mom purchased an automatic feeder for the aquarium to assure that the massive army of fish living in my bedroom were well taken care of for that week and some days of our absence. Everything was hooked up, and I was feeling confident. We left for our vacation and I didn't give it another thought. Then at some point, one of my parents decided to joke- "Wouldn't it be funny if we came home and all the fish were dead?" I'm not sure why this would be funny in retrospect, but this was no doubt what literary folks would term "dramatic irony". You see, as we returned from the trip and walked inside the house, we were met with a very sickening smell. I approached my room with a sense of dread, already knowing what I would find. Sure enough, there was an aquarium full of dead fish. At some point in the trip, the feeder had malfunctioned. The water became increasingly polluted and there was no food coming in. If you've never smelled a large vat of polluted fish water with 40 fish corpses floating about in it, consider yourself lucky. It is a vomit-inducing stench, no doubt. To this day, I still blame it on my parents for cracking the joke and dooming my fish.
And back to the Sim Aquarium. I have this horrible tendency to forget I have it running. The first night I used it, I got distracted doing other things. By the time I clicked back to the screen, my two fish had multiplied into twenty. Once again, I forgot about the program. I clicked back over in time to see that the water was polluted and my fish were dying off. I didn't learn my lesson, and forgot again. All in all, I managed to kill off a couple hundred simulated fish last night alone. As I was speaking to my mom, I mentioned 'Remember that time you guys laughed about my fish being dead and then when we came back they were? This is JUST LIKE THAT."
I am clearly not meant to own any sort of fish, real or simulated.