Good morning. Welcome to the Summer Vacation Parent Helpline Number. This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes. It may also be recorded to use as evidence against you in a legal dispute, should your children grow up and sue you for emotional trauma caused by repeated enrolment in Math Olympiads. Please choose from one of the following options so we can connect you to one of our counsellors. This may take some time, due to high volume of calls from other parents on the verge of a mental breakdown. Your call is important to us.
Press 1 if your children have started to bring home sackfuls of crap back from school. Items may include (but are not restricted to) renditions of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ using sequins and hot glue, Math and Science assignments that could not be found during the year, but magically made an appearance in the last week of term and lunch boxes which now have strange life forms growing and mating inside them. Our counsellor will help purge all items and restore balance to your home.
Press 2 if your children’s insufferable classmates are going to Rwanda, Croatia and the Easter Islands for their vacation. You are yet to tell your children that they are going to spend the rest of their vacation right where they are because you couldn’t get time off from work. Our counsellor will share unsubstantiated statistics on how people who holiday in exotic places come back with horrible parasitic diseases. You must then delete Facebook and Instagram from your smart phone.
Press 3 if your last week of term has been filled with time wasting efforts like attending project day, singing day, open house and class parties. Our counsellors will help find valid and totally believable excuses not to attend any of these, like: I didn’t link my Aadhaar card to being your parent and was stopped from leaving the house.
Press 4 if all the summer camps in your locality are overpriced, not long enough and are trying to palm off the same ‘Around the World in 8 Weeks’ and ‘Make a CEO out of your 7 year old’ ideas. Our counsellor will connect you to your local cable operator whose Mega Summer Mazaa Pack is cheaper, lasts all day long and will teach your child how to talk Hindi in an annoying high pitched voice.
Press 5 if your children’s holidays have begun and the little darlings are already bored. If you have heard ‘I’m bored’, ‘I can’t find anything to do!’, ‘Why was I born?’,‘Why can’t I have my own YouTube channel?’ ‘I have no toys’, ‘There’s nothing to play with!’ and ‘It’s too hot to play outside’ in the last 5 minutes, then this option is for you. Our counsellor will send noise cancellation ear buds by overnight carrier pigeon to you.
Press 6 if your house is overrun by your children’s friends because their parents ‘need to rest’. Our counsellor will help you perfect your Freddy Kruger impersonation and share phrases that are statistically proven to terrify children. As in option 2, these statistics are not substantiated by real scientists.
To hear these options again, press #. To register a fresh complaint bang your phone or head repeatedly on the table. Have a nice summer vacation.
Menaka Raman
@menakaraman
The writer’s philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me