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Chips on the ball!
When starting up a game, you'd hear someone yell out "dibbs" or "chips on the
ball!" In grown-up terms, this meant that by engaging in the activity, all
participants had knowingly entered into a binding agreement by which they took
responsibility to replace the item if their actions directly resulted in its
loss or physical destruction. In other words, if you hit the ball over the
roof - you had to get it or buy a new one.
Of course, collecting on this agreement would usually depend on the status of
the person calling chips, the size of the person who lost the ball and the
relationship between them. To put it bluntly, you might never collect.
Still, social norms would at least require the offender to supply the next
ball for the group's activity.
It should be remembered that all requirements were off if someone had screamed
"No Chips", before you said Chips. If they wanted to make sure that they were
totally covered, they really needed to call "No Chips No Nothin," just in case
you had another method of registering your case. Given the central role the
pink rubber ball had in our world, our methods for restitution were pretty
simple.
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