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On Reddit, one user described how his young cousin destroyed a screen worth $350 in a matter of seconds, simply by approaching his simulator. This mishap revealed another problem with the car-racing enthusiast’s setup.
A broken screen, a shaky simulator and suspicious silence
The story begins with a harmless gesture. Reddit user Comfortable-Mood1717 reluctantly agreed to let his young cousin test his racing simulator. “I felt bad because he really wanted to use it,” he wrote. Miscalculation. No sooner had he gone upstairs to get a glass of water than he came back down to find his cousin sitting on the sidelines, eyes glued to his phone… and his $350 monitor in pieces. It wasn’t the kid who spoke, but the carnage on the desk. The members of r/simracing were quick to analyse the scene: the screen had been placed on the edge of a piece of furniture, the feet were unstable, and the steering wheel had been mounted directly on a table with no rigid support. “The monitor’s feet are right on the edge of the table and, by coincidence, if it were to fall, it would hit the base exactly where it was going to hit”, noted one user.
Let my little cousin use it for 2 minutes…
byu/Comfortable-Mood1717 insimracing
Some go even further: what if the child hadn’t broken anything at all? “It’s possible that the vibrations from the wheel caused it to fall on the corner of the wheelbase and your cousin assumed it was his fault and reassembled it to try and fix it?” analyses LuminusWasHere, in response to the photo posted. For others, the most likely scenario is that the child found the monitor on the ground and, thinking he’d done something stupid, tried to discreetly put it back in place.
More a design error than a child accident
The debate quickly turned into a people’s court. But it’s not the little cousin who’s in the dock. “If a child can climb in and break it, your setup isn’t stable”, says Strife14, who shares a similar personal misadventure with a broken seat and a gear lever ripped off.
Tech Few people know it, but it’s essential to turn off your phone’s Wi-Fi when leaving home.
The community does not dwell on the emotions of the author of the post, but on the amateurism of his installation. “It’s all your fault. With the way you placed the screen on the desk, it was a question of when, not if,” accuses another user. A number of users pointed out that a wall bracket, an articulated arm or a more rigid structure would have prevented this accident. Others reiterated a simple rule: never let a child near such fragile equipment without direct supervision.
