I Definitely Should Not Parent

One of my coworkers brought his grandson, I'd guess eight or nine years old, to work the other day.  He does this periodically when the little monster doesn't have school, gets him to do little jobs in the back that I will then have to clean up later.  SO helpful.

Anyway, I guess there wasn't enough to keep him occupied this time, because he kept coming around and bothering me.  I'm not a jerk, so I listened to him complain about school and answered his questions about what I was doing, and generally tolerated his mucking about as long as I didn't think he was going to hurt himself or break anything his grandpa couldn't replace.  At some point he was fooling around tying various bits of scrap wire together with wire nuts, and while I was writing up an order and calculating in my head how long it would take to untangle the knot he was creating, he commented that he was really enjoying playing with our electricity, and his parents never let him play with electricity at home.

It took a second for me to put together that he didn't know the difference between electricity and wiring.  My first thought then was to wonder whether explaining it to him would make him more or less likely to accidentally fry himself.  In the end we established that he knew enough only to play with "electricity" that wasn't connected to anything, which struck me as a pretty poor safety standard, so I tried to reinforce his parents admonitions with some stories about my own electrically-induced injuries when I realized two things:

1. This kid has been hounding me all day about what I'm doing, what my tools are, etc.  The last thing that will keep him from electrocuting himself is hearing that I'd done it.
2. I wouldn't be the person I am now, or have the job he was bugging me at, if anyone had ever succeeded at preventing me from "playing with electricity" when I was younger.

So I felt sort of conflicted and just kind of trailed off.  I don't think the kid learned much from that.