That Guy: It's a fine line between pleasure and pain

Opinion

One of the big stories last week involved a man leaving his son locked in a car while he visited a strip club.

Naturally this incident outraged many New Zealanders, and the perpetrator was rightly crucified in the media for his actions.

Though I don't condone the man's actions in any way, I can see how this kind of debacle can occur through a slight lapse in concentration. You see, in the very same week, I found myself in a very similar predicament.

What is perhaps amazing about my situation is that even though I am one of the country's most-respected but least-quoted columnists, my incident never even made headlines.

Why? I believe subtle differences in the circumstances clearly highlight my better sense of judgement as a parent, and demonstrate that there can be a very fine line between poor parenting and good parenting.

In a nutshell, my case never made the headlines because when all is said and done it is probably a story about good parenting, and the media aren't really interested in stories like that.

Anyway, last Tuesday afternoon, I left a 28-year-old prostitute in a car for over 45 minutes while I visited my son's kindergarten.

To fully understand the situation, you need to know the background.

Over breakfast that morning I had arranged with my wife to pick up my son from kindy, but later things got a little crazy at work and I became a little confused.

It was only just before pick-up time that I remembered that I was on call so I had to drop everything immediately and head straight to his kindergarten. This obviously meant I didn't have time to drop off a prostitute called Roxy.

We arrived at the kindy, and I asked Roxy to wait in the car while I went inside to pick up my son but once in there things got a little out of hand.

It just so happened that it was Parents' Day and all the kids were putting on a show for us and we were even asked to take part in some fun activities.

Thanks to an earlier work trip to Thailand, I had missed the Christmas party a few months earlier so I was eager to make up for it now.

Minutes later I was dressed up in a pirate costume, singing sea shanties with everybody else. All the while Roxy remained locked in the car outside.

It probably sounds very irresponsible but I had left two windows down a little, and said that she could smoke in the car if she wanted to. She was in a secure kindergarten car park, so at no time did I ever consider her to be in any sort of danger.

At around 3.35pm a passerby noticed the prostitute locked in the car and tried to hire her but she refused. Then at around 3.40pm another passerby also noticed her locked in the back seat of the car and decided to call the police.

By the time my son and I came out of the kindergarten 45 minutes later with all the other parents, all hell had broken loose. The police had cordoned off the car, and with the "jaws of life", were in the process of extracting the hot prostitute from the vehicle.

I explained my situation to the officers who, luckily for me, were parents themselves, and they agreed that it was all a huge misunderstanding and decided against pressing charges. The same can't be said about Roxy. She didn't actually press charges but kept the meter running, so to speak, throughout the entire experience.

Though more Asian than Scandinavian in appearance, she uses a Swedish rounding sort of pricing system, so any time over 45 minutes gets rounded up to an hour.

Combine the cost of her prostitution services with the price of the chocolate fudge cake I bought to help raise money to extend the sandpit, and you start to have a fairly expensive day at kindy.

Certainly these were costs I would struggle to explain to my wife when I got home. I expect if we send our kids to private school, these are the sort of costs we will have to get used to, however.

The main thing I suppose is that everybody was safe. I said goodbye to the other parents who by now were milling around the car to see what was going on, buckled my son in his car seat next to Roxy and calmly left the scene.

If nothing else this story clearly demonstrates that the difference between good parenting and bad parenting when prostitution is thrown into the mix.

It depends very much on who ends up being locked in the car, and I suspect that most good parents instinctively know this.