I got the notification while cutting strawberries for my two-year-old daughter. It said that £25 had been taken from my Amazon account for ‘TVOD’. This suggested the purchase of some TV On Demand programming, albeit a very expensive unit of same.
I immediately presumed my wife had made the purchase via our shared account, but since this was 11am and she was visiting a friend in Berlin, it suggested her trip had taken a turn toward boredom that I found at least mildly alarming.
I gently inquired as to what, precisely, she’d bought. No reply was forthcoming, but this was fairly usual. She observes an attitude towards her phone I would best describe as casual. Others might call it neglect. In any case, trying to get an immediate response from her on any subject is like waiting on a fax from Batman.
On placing the fruity segments in front of my daughter, however, it became clear my wife had had nothing to do with it. My daughter was watching Thomas the Tank Engine, as she had been when I began preparing her snack, but a notification on screen displayed confirmation of a purchase she had made in the interim.
Navigating back to the home screen, I discovered her nimble little fingers had managed, click by click, to order the pay-per-view offering advertised directly above it. Namely, that evening’s world heavyweight boxing match between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk.
I am still at a loss as to how she managed this. Consider that it would have required navigating through at least three separate windows to select the correct page and confirm the payment. And that this she must have done, either entirely at random, or else guided by a nascent passion for boxing of which I was hitherto unaware.
That all done, she then cycled back out to the home screen and resumed her locomotive amusement as if nothing had happened. All this executed by a girl who is still not yet capable of saying her own name.
I learned several things from this experience. First, you can order pay-per-view boxing matches from Amazon. Second, it is impossible to cancel a pay-per-view boxing match from Amazon. And third, I had essentially been fined £25 for leaving my daughter unattended for 45 seconds. I can’t really dispute that this was deserved.
As she becomes more independent, learning words and happily playing by herself, I have perhaps become complacent about the many ways in which she needs direct supervision.
I spent the rest of the day watching her like a hawk. I’d like to say this was out of fatherly protectiveness, but the protection of my bank balance was a nice bonus. As for that night, well, I suddenly had plans: watching a world heavyweight title fight from start to finish for the first time in my life. I mean, if I’ve bought the bloody thing.
Follow Séamas on X @shockproofbeats
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
