It was my nephew's birthday a while back. He likes his technology and he's quite a responsible young man, so I bought him a drone with an onboard camera. It arrived in the post, and I thought I'd better check that it was fully charged and working. I tried flying it around the living room and it all seemed quite controllable, but I was a bit worried I might bump into something. The best course of action was to take it out to the garden. It would be safer and more sensible using it out there. It went up, it came down again. The problem is, that's when I should have stopped. While my nephew may be responsible enough to be a drone owner, I am obviously not.
It went up again. Higher than before this time, then the wind rose slightly....suddenly it was over my neighbours garden, I tried to steer it back, but to no avail. Now it was 3 neighbours gardens away, climbing and picking up speed...the last I saw of it, what only seemed like 20 seconds later, was it descending slowly into a housing development about half a mile away. What was I going to do, my nephew's birthday was in 2 days and there was no present.
I thought that I might be able to hear it at night when there was no traffic on the busy main road. At 3am I walked around 100+ houses in the housing development straining my ears to hear the rotors turning as I revved the controller, I checked about 30 trees to see if I could see the navigation lights. No luck at all. Next day I printed up 120 leaflets with a picture of the drone, my phone number and a reward and posted them through all the letter boxes. Still no luck. I ended up going to the birthday party empty handed. All I had left is what's shown in the photo.
I said, "sorry Kyle" and told him the story. "Oh well", he said, I didn't really want a drone anyway. I really hoped you were going to get me a pair of walkie talkies. There you have it, he is much more responsible than his Uncle Max....
