All that glitters...

This incident took place in the early eighties when I was still in my upper primary class.
We had a lot of stuff to read in our house. My father subscribed to The Blitz, The Times Of India and the now defunct Illustrated Weekly of India (then edited by the most venerable Khushwant Singh). So we were never really short of reading material.
The Illustrated Weekly reserved its last page for classifieds and one advertisement insert that appeared week after week caught my fancy. It was an advert for a mini printing press. It promised to print wedding cards, visiting cards and anything that came to your imagination.
I was intrigued by this product and I mentioned this to my father one day. He brushed it off as a child's immature fancy. But week after week I saw the ad and got more and more excited about it.
Finally my father told me he would order the product. It cost 30 rupees which was quite a sum in those days. The order was supposed to be placed by VPP(Value Post Payable) which meant that we would have to pay the postman the amount before we could open the package.
I waited anxiously for the mini printing press and started dreaming of all kinds of thing I would be able to do with it.
It was a long wait but one day finally the printing press arrived. The postman handed over the package, my father paid the money and I tore open the bundle as soon as I could.
To my dismay what was supposed to be a "printing press" was just a collection of rubber blocks with inverted letters embossed on it. There was a small holder for the these blocks and an ink stamp pad came with it. It was just a crude rubber stamp.
I tried arranging the letters on the holder to spell out my name. I pressed it against the pad and tried to make an impression on paper. But it was a clumsy process. The letters fell out and if they didn't, the impression was imperfect with some letters not producing any imprint, being misaligned.
I was dismayed.
My father laughed. He said,"Let this be your first lesson in life about buying. You always have to be careful of being cheated".
I wondered whether my father indeed had an idea of what the so called printing press would be, when he placed the order.
I never bugged my father for anything after that, until I reached the 10th grade when I asked for, and got a typewriter which proved out to be a real utility and on which I drafted my first story which appeared in a local english magazine in serialized form.
I had learnt an important lesson in life - things are not always what they seem.
Later in life I saw some weird products some of my friend bought on the internet. A mosquito killer arrived in the form of a hammer and a plate. There were spurious products which promised to produce rays which would repell anything from flies to rodents.
I smile now, when I think about that mini printing press and what it turned out to be and what it taught me.