Babies make terrible spies

I was chatting with my buddy Brett a week or so ago, and he was mentioning how his house smells of baby shit all the time, and I mentioned that would probably disqualify them as spies. I say it again, should any spy agencies be monitoring this blog (you know who you are)--you must not, under any circumstances, employ babies as operatives.

This should go without saying, and yet I do say it. Babies, while cute and cuddly, make lousy spies. First off, they know no languages, and this seems to me to be a failing of the first rank. They can't understand anyone they're spying on. I don't know a single baby who can speak Russian, or Farsi. You can say a few words in Chinese to them, and they'll smile, but you know they're faking. They don't even know English!! This makes the reports they file utterly useless.

And they cry, often at the worst moment imaginable. There you are, with your new baby spy partner, and you are listening round a corner to some secret meeting between peace protesters, and all of a sudden, your partner starts crying, for no other reason than that he's cranky! And you have to pick him up, if indeed you weren't already holding him, and gently jiggle keys over his face until he quiets down. This is a partner who is not pulling his own weight. Indeed, is incapable of pulling any weight at all. His physical strength is negligible, so forget about any backup when the peace protesters, having been alerted to your presence, start kicking your ass!

Then there is the smell. Anyone who has smelled baby doo doo never forgets it. And there is no predicting when your partner will let loose, either. Actually there is. It's going to be about every 2 hours. Every two hours. You can set your secret combination GPS tracker/flashlight spy watch to it. You will be making a secret drop of spy photos, and your partner will be making his own drop. Count on it. And his will smell much worse than the developing fluid on your microfilm.

The list goes on and on. He is not going to outrun anyone. His analytical skills are laughable. His sex appeal actually runs to negative numbers (even if you have loads of sex appeal yourself, his poor abilities as a wing man resets the meter to zero). He is incapable of playing most games, like baccarat or bridge. He simply lacks the attention span to think even one move ahead. 

You can't even use a baby as a prop. He is unreliable in that capacity. You can dress in hemp clothes, cover yourself in henna tattoos, twist your hair into dreadlocks, and put your partner in a baby/daddy sling, and blend in with the other protesters outside the WTO meeting, and just when you are about to draw out from one of them the top secret master plan for liberal world domination, your "partner" will choose this time to point at you and to coo his first word "SPY!"

So, please, for the sake of us all, do not employ babies as spies. Thank you.