‘Bean Dad’ Slammed Over Refusal to Open Can for Daughter
Written by SOURCE on January 5, 2021
Over the weekend Twitter swarmed the mentions of a person dubbed “Bean Dad” (who had previously gone by the non-Twitter name John Roderick) over his refusal to open a tin can for his kid.
A sentence like that probably doesn’t need added context, but we’ll try.
On Saturday, Roderick shared a (too long) thread that told a story of advising his hungry nine-year-old daughter to eat baked beans, the favorite food of kids worldwide:
Long story short, she didn’t know how to use a can opener. At some point she quit, and then at some other point she came back to it. At some point *six hours later* everything came together:
According to Roderick, she eventually floated the idea of using a hammer to bust open the can.
Again, the process reportedly took six hours.
YouTube next time:
The thread went on for more than 20 tweets, and included lines such as “I told her stories of some of the great cans I’d opened over the years. She rolled her eyes. We talked about industrial design and what a funny little device the opener is,” and “She looked at me expectantly, excitedly. After six hours of trying you don’t want to express too much hope. Was this another blind alley? The can had been through hell, label ripped off, dented, sharpened and burred, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. She knew, though.”
This hopefully serves as enough evidence of why more tweets aren’t embedded. You can read it all here, including his responses to very angry criticisms, before wondering why you’re doing that.
Some might find this thread to be a story of a man trying too hard to sound deep, whereas others (me) might’ve fallen asleep halfway through.
Still, Twitter, where cooler heads always prevail, and hysteria is shouted down by the reasonable, was of the opinion that this was either shitty or good parenting. Come to your own conclusion, but that’s how the “Bean Dad” moniker was born.
Here’s a sample of the reaction, followed by Bean Dad’s reaction to the reaction below it. As is often the case with micro-controversies, the real winners here seem to be those who stayed away:
In addition to tweets @’ing or quoting Bean Dad, there were more general jokes that capitalized on a new addition to the culture war lexicon. Only time will tell if this one lasts, but let us all hope it does not:
After the Twitter furor came to Roderick’s attention he responded by saying the firestorm was overblown. That’s just the most basic way of putting it, but here he is reflecting upon it in his own words:
