Dad sells son's GH3 game on Ebay [Archive]

Fee

03-01-2008, 04:28 PM

http://cgi.ebay.com/Guitar-Hero-III-3-Legends-of-Rock-Wii-NEW-WITH-RECEIPT_W0QQitemZ200181539427QQihZ010QQcategoryZ62 053QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphoto hosting

That's the auction for the game, but do you think that the father's actions are justified?
He comes home after getting the game to find his son smoking "pot" so he puts the game on ebay as a sort of puishment. What's your opinion?

bionic sheep

03-01-2008, 05:26 PM

At first, I figured this would be pretty much bullshit, but it's actually an interesting read, and I have to admit I've got a lot of respect for the guy that put it up; although it's a wee bit harsh, he said himself that he didn't intend to actually sell it really, just to shake up his son a bit.

The guy seems fairly informed when it comes to cannabis related issues, so it's not just some ultra-conservative bastard punishing his son out of the blue. Ultimately, if you live with your folks, you have to respect their rules, and this is pretty much just an extension of that.

Obviously he didn't sell it in the end, but I imagine the kid has learnt his lesson.

Roxsie

03-01-2008, 05:27 PM

Technically the game wasn't the son's as he hadn't been given it. Therefore the father had every right to put it up on ebay when he found his son smoking weed. However it is a bit harsh seeing as supposedly the son really wanted it.

Midget

03-01-2008, 05:49 PM

the guy is a back-pedalling prick and i'm so thankful he's not my dad

tehmoogles

03-01-2008, 05:53 PM

The guy was perfectly in the right. The kid's under his roof, he lives by his rules. He breaks them, then that's his punishment. It may be harsh, but it was also fair.

Midget

03-01-2008, 05:56 PM

he's still a prick though

he could've just sold the thing, telling the whole world about it was just pointless

Taekwon-joe

03-01-2008, 05:56 PM

All in all the guy seems like a good father its just a really unusual punishment.

Good read though. He certainly seems to know what he's talking about.

Stig

03-01-2008, 05:59 PM

I guess one form of punishment is to take away the item the person is most attached to, but to sell it is a little harsh. Then again, finding your son smoking pot is quite serious.

Lewiji

03-01-2008, 06:05 PM

The cynical side of me says there's far too much detail in his story and particularly his "follow-ups"; and the "FREE SHIPPING TO THE USA" in huge letters makes me wonder whether this is all a scam to see how much of a profit he could make.

Dr S

03-01-2008, 06:35 PM

dad was completely in his right to sell the game and I would have done the same.

he's just an attention seeker is all.

Twatybollocks

03-01-2008, 06:44 PM

I don't know, first of all you can't kick the shit out of your kids if they've done wrong now you can't sell all their gear on ebay....what is the world coming to!!

katt

03-01-2008, 07:01 PM

I don't know, first of all you can't kick the shit out of your kids if they've done wrong now you can't sell all their gear on ebay....what is the world coming to!!

I think a lack of proper punishments is often to blame for a decay in society. If children can get away with anything and have no respect then they probably have a better chance of growing up into adults who think they can get away with anything and have no respect.

If a parent does not believe pot is a good thing then he or she has the right to bring their child up with such a belief in mind.

If i had a kid who was smoking pot and was under 18 I would be very upset as I am very much against drugs. I would think up some huge punishment but i probably would not tell everyone on ebay about it. If he or she was over 18 i would still voice my disapproval but there is not much you can do at that point as far as punishments.

of course the chances of my kids smoking pot seems very slim. The only sachets filled with herbs i ever kept in my drawer were scented ones to make my clothes smell nice :P

LeoZ

03-01-2008, 07:16 PM

both the father and the son sound like dicks.

/$0.02

edit: speaking of dollas, can someone explain to me why the hell it went for OVER 9000 dollars?

Scrumpopolis

03-01-2008, 07:37 PM

Because people of the opinion that selling someones copy of guitar hero is worse than the holocaust put in fake bids and never paid.

Bappel

03-01-2008, 08:07 PM

Not that the GH3 was the kids. The dad never gave him the gift. So to me its still the dads GH3 and he can do whatever he feels to do with it.

gembird

03-01-2008, 08:08 PM

katt

03-01-2008, 08:31 PM

I read it and it did sound a bit attention seeking but still within reason.

Basically he wanted to make a big deal about it to a lot of people who have nothing to do with his son's behavior (asking random people on the internet to convince him to let his son have the game). And he never actually went through with the proper punishment so it was all pointless.

I suppose the good that came of it was he caught his son's attention with the auction and had conversations with him about it (and hopefully got his points across to him).

A game is a game. A gift does not have to be given. I don't think it would have been that harsh of a punishment even if he actually sold it

Roachy

04-01-2008, 12:43 AM

he could've just sold the thing, telling the whole world about it was just pointless

To be honest, he has gone to a number of lengths to ensure that his son's privacy has been kept (i.e. naming him "Isaac" instead of using his actual first name). In light of that, I wouldn't say he's told the world about it. He just has an interesting back story for the auction.

I'd say he was justified to do it. While living in his house, the kid should respect his rules. His father is obviously punishing him to ensure that things like this don't happen again, which is understandable.

In my opinion, all of those Pro-Weed people who have posted in outrage on the eBay auction are barking up the wrong tree. The auction isn't about whether weed is a bad thing or not, it's about the punishment his son is receiving for breaking one of the rules of his father's house.

If you were invited into somebody's home and they had a rule that stated one couldn't wear shoes in the house, would you wear shoes in their house? Or would you respect the rules of their house and take them off.

It's the same as his father. In his father's house, marijuana is not to be smoked. His son smoked marijuana on the property, so his father punishes him for rule breaking.

A lesson that breaking the rules is bad.

doctor_fruitbat

04-01-2008, 12:53 AM

I know smoking a joint isn’t the end of the world
Seems pretty reasonable to me. The kid is 15; he shouldn't be smoking anything full stop, let alone a substance that is illegal for all ages.

Midget

04-01-2008, 03:03 AM

yeah but it's like publically hanging someone for petty theft

he just went overkill on the punishment and has now made weed out to be a huge thing, if he'd just sold the game and told him why, it would've quickly nipped the problem in the bud

i know it's obviously intended to scare him away from smoking weed but i just think it'll make the kid more pissed off and more likely to resort to drugs

(and as someone mentioned about their sceptical side, it all does a bit weird... all the back pedalling and excessive excuses he makes just seem like a stupid way of attracting attention to his auction... i call bullshit/exaggeration)

Mittwoch

04-01-2008, 03:14 AM

I get the impression that he's pretty much resigned to the fact that if his son is smoking pot at his friend's houses he can't really be stopped, and that the two are genuinely fairly close. The way I see it the dad has been pretty reasonable about the whole thing and I think it's a good choice to actually do something other than shout - just doing that will most likely make his son resent him (especially if they are as close as he says) and disregard his best wishes or advice.

Smartie

04-01-2008, 09:10 AM

yeah but it's like publically hanging someone for petty theft

he just went overkill on the punishment and has now made weed out to be a huge thing, if he'd just sold the game and told him why, it would've quickly nipped the problem in the bud

Hanging was popular for petty theft in Europe a couple of centuries ago. Whether it worked as a deterrent or not is another matter.

Yeah, but maybe for the dad it IS a huge thing.
You cannot judge him by your own standards.
For some of us who've seen the damage drugs can do, can see no benefit to tolerating it. Lets not cast stones at people whose attitudes may disagree from our own.

If I had children and I found them using drugs of any description they'd be on one - and only one - warning. However, i'd like to think that I'd bring my children up to show respect, and honour my wishes to behave in an appropriate way.

Quite frankly I would have sold the game, and shut the materialistic little shit of a son up.

Roachy

04-01-2008, 10:27 AM

If I had children and I found them using drugs of any description they'd be on one - and only one - warning. However, i'd like to think that I'd bring my children up to show respect, and honour my wishes to behave in an appropriate way..

This^

I don't think that this punishment is going to do the young lad any harm, as such. I reckon that the dad does have a decent amount of reasons behind his actions and has (assuming you guys have read it all) dealt with a lot of the negative things that people have been suggesting about this punishment with reasonable explanations.

I can see where people are coming from in seeing it as too harsh but in my opinion, the father is in his right to do it as he has justified his actions with explanations that seem good enough to me.

Bappel

04-01-2008, 10:53 AM

Hanging was popular for petty theft in Europe a couple of centuries ago. Whether it worked as a deterrent or not is another matter.

Didnt they cut their hands off? Or was the hands cut of for pick pocketing?

I still think that the dad did the right thing. I would have done the same. Mainly becous its a pretty fun thing. A fun way of punishing your kid. If I had done something bad during my years as a kid under my parents roof and they caught me I would rather have this kind of punishment instead of verbal or physical. This makes you think in a way. And even laugh about it. Though if they sold something I owned and considered mine I would be outraged. But in this case the boy didnt own it. He was suposed to be owning it but hadnt recieved it yet. Its like buying a box of chocolate to your loved one and eat it yourself and then not tell her about it. And maybe you'll buy another one a day later and she wont even notice the difference.

Smokey

04-01-2008, 12:53 PM

yeah but it's like publically hanging someone for petty theft

he just went overkill on the punishment and has now made weed out to be a huge thing, if he'd just sold the game and told him why, it would've quickly nipped the problem in the bud

Public hanging isn't really anything like having a present returned to the store, unless you can't live without Guitar Hero. If he'd just sold it then his son probably wouldn't have believed him.

I've got loads of respect for someone who actually decides not to reward badly behaved kids at Christamas. Many parents nowadays would still have given their kid all the presents they wanted (and gone into debt... but that's another debate) despite them getting expelled from school and being caught selling drugs to 5 year olds.

Good for him, he hit his son where it hurt. Personally I wouldn't mind discipling my future kids the same way. "I said to be back by 10, I'm taking your TV. I paid for it".

Midget

04-01-2008, 01:05 PM

i knew somebody would be too stupid to understand that -____-

of course i'm not comparing having your game sold on ebay to being hung

what i was trying to say, is he went overboard for such a petty thing

these days, nearly every single kid will try weed some time in their life, and making a massive deal out of it will only encourage the kid to keep trying it and see what all the fuss is about

the guy even talks about how smoking one spliff isn't that bad in the description, so i'm not going by my standards, i'm going from his

and again because smokey hasn't bothered to try and understand my post, i wasn't saying he shouldn't have had his game sold, i think that is a perfectly reasonable punishment, i was saying the dad shouldn't have publically humiliated him on ebay

and also, does nobody else think it all just seems too farfetched? i read through the whole thing and it just screams scam to me

Baguette

04-01-2008, 02:11 PM

I disagree with the thing about the guy being an attention seeker- I think making a fuss about it on eBay was part of the punishment and was intended to embarrass the son. To be honest, I think it's a damn good way to punish a kid- he's fifteen and smoking weed in his dad's house, he has done something wrong. This way, his mates get to see it and laugh at him for being a twat, and that'll have more of an effect on him than just telling him off will. However, it might just make him hide any further drug use.
This

He was using ebay as an awesome way of making a point.
Normally it would be, parent takes away kid's toy, eventually kid gets toy back, no one knows, kid starts being a dick again.
But by publicising it for all his friends to see it will actually have a chance of teaching him a lesson.

Tiode

04-01-2008, 02:42 PM

Despite all of his effort though, i doubt this will stop his son smoking pot forever.

Baguette

04-01-2008, 02:43 PM

But it should him smoking it on his property, which was the guy's main aim

feeshy

04-01-2008, 03:21 PM

Come on people, it's a game. If it was locking him in a cellar with no food or water for a week, then I'm sure you'd be justified in saying it was over the top, but it really isn't that awful. Heck, if my parents found me smoking anything in the garden, let alone something illegal, you'd have to dig me out of the grave to find out whether I thought it was harsh or not.

Vercci

04-01-2008, 04:07 PM

and again because smokey hasn't bothered to try and understand my post, i wasn't saying he shouldn't have had his game sold, i think that is a perfectly reasonable punishment, i was saying the dad shouldn't have publically humiliated him on ebay

The father did clearly state that this wasn't as public as you'd might think, that he's gotten +60,000 hits from this auction and more yada and blah about how tiny the chance that anyone that knew them would call or find out about it. It's like people on /b/ asking the internet to comfort them. They don't even know each other (as if Anonymous helps in this) and there's barely any chance (except brothers/sisters on at the same time as you) of them even knowing each other.

The father said that the bond between them has strengthened and I'd say the boy's learned his lesson.

Mittwoch

04-01-2008, 05:46 PM

I still think that the dad did the right thing. I would have done the same. Mainly becous its a pretty fun thing. A fun way of punishing your kid. If I had done something bad during my years as a kid under my parents roof and they caught me I would rather have this kind of punishment instead of verbal or physical. This makes you think in a way. And even laugh about it..

I find this quite interesting and I think that's why I agree with the punishment - it's not just shouting or being grounded or whatever, it's actually something you might laugh about and you'd think about it a lot. Placing myself in the boy's situation I'd also feel very guilty especially if I knew my father was pretty excited over the fact that he'd finally found this present and wanted to make me happy too - and not only had I broken his trust, I had robbed him of something that would've made him happy. I think it's also a good way to bring the two closer because the son may admire his dad for doing something a little unconventional like that. He knows he's done something wrong but he doesn't feel too condemned.

As for the 'public humiliation', I think that's also a part of it. I don't think it's too harsh. Sure, the boy would probably feel victimised at first since all these people knew what he'd done and what was going on but after you realise that nobody actually knows who he is, or, in a similar way to making an ass out of yourself in public, he will most likely never meet any of those people. So it is humiliating, but not in a particularly harsh of victimising way.