Goodbye Mickey

Yesterday I left my desk at Arcada for the last time, and took a few of the remaining possessions with me. I took this tall Mickey Mouse figure because it has a long history of accompanying me places.

The data on it says 1999, which must mean that I collected the pieces in 2000. The pieces all came with Happy Meals and I scoured the MacDonalds of Helsinki to find all the separate parts. They all do something and, in addition, they all fit together into Mickey.

The head acts like a ViewMaster, except that it has two Disney slides preloaded and will not accept any more. The arm section has a press button on the back and used to make a noise of some kind. It doesn’t any more. The trousers open up to form a pair of binoculars. The feet have rollers on the bottom which print out a continuous pattern if you dip them in ink.

I got it out and assembled it to take a photograph of it. During this process the head and trousers fell onto the floor and broke. The plastic has got very brittle after twenty one years of standing in a window at Arcada.

The trouser section more or lesss shattered and so we decided that we should simply throw it out. In a way this seemed fitting. It had sat on various desks in Arcada until I retired and, by a cosmic coincidence, Arcada became an activity-based workspace in which nobody will have a desk to put things like this on anyway.

It sat with me at Arcada, and when it could no longer do that it gave up doing anything at all.