Just Wrong #3 - Electric Football

I had forgotten about this childhood vexation until I recently read Bill Bryson's "The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid", wherein he spends a couple paragraphs telling about his Electric Football frustrations. As shown, you set the pieces up on a rectangular metal sheet, then turn on a switch which vibrates the 'playing field'. The little figurines actually rest (IIRC) on a pair of stiff bits of plastic. In theory, the vibration causes them to "run" (a lot of imagination is required) in the direction they point.

In practice, they moved in any old direction. But mostly, they just fell over on their sides from the vibration, and laid there like dying cockroaches, in turn impeding and knocking over still other pieces.

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If you're fascinated by random number generators, I suppose you could find some entertainment here. For the other 99.9% of us, the whole shebang got put back in the box within 10 minutes. I don't know if any toy companies still make Electric Football, but if they do, for the love of all that's decent, don't buy it for your kids.