This may win the 'strangest news of the day' award...
Remember that nineties toy you just loved to play with, Bop It? It’s making a comeback: but in quite an unexpected way.
The Guardian reports that everyone’s favourite taxi service, Uber, has come up with a unique way of occupying drunk passengers – leaving a Bop It in the back seat.
After several reports of drunk passengers abusing drivers, the brains behind the popular app believe that providing the noisy children’s game for tipsy customers to play with will prevent them from pestering the driver.
The experiment is first being trialled in Charlotte, North Carolina, after increased levels of assaults on drivers were recently reported.
‘An intoxicated rider who is engaged in something interesting is less likely to be irritable and aiming aggression at the driver,’ said Uber’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan.
However, there’s no word on how irritable the Uber driver would be after having to listen to hours on end of wasted passengers trying to play drunken Bop It.
Just in case you weren’t lucky enough to have a Bop It toy as a kid, it’s a loud, colourful came that consists of a stick or handle giving you instructions.
The commands, which tell you to either bop a button, twist a crank or pull a knob, get faster and faster until the player messes up.
In any case, you’ll definitely remember the Bop It adverts with their catchy commands: ‘Bop it, twist it, pull it, bend it, flip it, extend it, load it.’
Here’s a 1998 Bop It advert to refresh your memory…
This isn’t only the innovative way the company are trying to get passengers to regulate their behaviour.
In another experiment in Seattle, some Uber drivers installed passenger-facing mirrors in the back seats, with the belief that if drunk and abusive passengers physically saw their behaviour, they would be more likely to moderate it.