Great, Now Show The Kid Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’!

A family has come out of seeing the latest Jurassic World movie. One of their younger children is looking a bit unsettled. They approach one of my coworkers while talking to her young child:

Parent Customer: “See, this gentleman works here, so he knows all about the movie.” *To my coworker.* “Now, the dinosaurs aren’t real, right? They can’t hurt little children in real life; they’re make-believe.”

If she had approached any other coworker, literally any other, she would have received the calming and compassionate answer she was looking for, to be able to calm the anxiety or fear of her child.

But she didn’t approach any of us; she approached [Coworker], and [Coworker]’s unique spiciness on the neurodivergency spectrum means that he never lies and never understands emotional cues. So, instead of a “dinosaurs aren’t real and they can’t hurt you”, this mother and child get:

Coworker: “Dinosaurs are currently extinct, but they were very much real animals as evidenced by the fossil record.”

This is not the answer the little kid needed to hear, so I jumped in to try to mediate between them.

Me: “Yes, but extinct means none of them are around anymore today, right?”

Coworker: “Only the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct because of the meteor; the avian ones were fine and are still around to this day.”

For the love of… I’m about to explain that avian means ‘birds’ to calm this kid down again, I am very shocked when the kid smiles, stands a little straighter, and says:

Kid: “Oh! Avians! Those are birds! We learned about that in school.”

Phew! This is a kid who can put two and two together. Coworker is about to interject with another “well, technically…” so I jump in again:

Me: “Yes! Avians are birds, and they are what the surviving dinosaurs evolved into.”

This time it’s the mom who responds:

Parent Customer: “Is that because they were in the air when the meteor hit the ground?”

The coworker is about to explode into an avalanche of scientific corrections, so I start to drag him away, saying:

Me: “Yup, that’s right! Have a nice night, now! Glad you enjoyed the movie!”