The Ferret & Dartboard

Police know that the first sign of affiliation into a new gang is a change in the subject's vocabulary. New words. Unfamiliar names. Did little Johnny never mention the words "locating datum" before he suddenly blurted it out by accident one night at dinner? It may be time to have a conversation with his teacher, to find out more about who he spends his time with at school. If you can get to it early enough, you can nip it in the bud.

In a similar vein, it's important to figure out where all their money is going. Kids who get hooked on the machinist lifestyle will often buy ridiculous things in order to "prove" their affiliation with the gang. One mother of two in Rhode Island came home to find a bunch of strange metallic cylinders on her doorstep, shipped overnight from FedEx to her youngest child. Round stock. She thought it was "just a phase." Her child is doing time in a federal penitentiary, after getting all fucked up on DYKEM markers and stabbing an engineer for submitting an insufficiently dimensioned drawing.

Last, an obsession with precision is often your last chance to have a talk with a wayward child. Are things in your house suddenly becoming rigidly aligned to an invisible grid system? Are you noticing things becoming burnished or otherwise polished, that weren't before? A trusted adult's timely intervention when your kid is micrometering a piece of sheet metal found in the alley may be all that is saving your kid from a lifetime of obsessing over thousandths.