Okay, so you
wouldn’t actually
do it (although probably no jury would convict you. Just sayin'). But
be honest—you’ve thought about it. We all have. If you’re a
p
arent, grandparent, or unlucky neighbor within a three-block radius
of a teenager, you’ve probably had a moment where you thought,
“This
is how it ends. I’m going to snap, and the local paper is going to
call me ‘a quiet person who mostly kept to herself'.”
Here’s my moment.
My 17-year-old grandson decided to build himself a computer. And I don’t mean “order one on Amazon.” I mean build one—from scratch—like some nerdy Frankenstein, piecing together a motherboard, CPU, and a graphics card big enough to control NORAD. Honestly, it was impressive. He spent hours researching, comparing specs, and watching more tutorials than any human should. I didn’t know whether to applaud or call in NASA.
Then he spent even more hours on my computer, eating up my internet while he shopped for deals, checked compatibility, and watched tech reviews until I started hearing them in my sleep. He even used my credit card—with my blessing—to order all the parts.
And to his credit, he paid me back. Every penny. Right there, I had myself a proud Grandma moment. Short-lived, but proud.
And now. . . enter the part of the story where homicide becomes a legitimate thought.
Being a brand-new computer, it had no games—which is apparently a felony in Teenager Land, punishable by whining, sulking, and walking through the house like a Dickens orphan. So he bought his favorite game—no idea what it was, probably something with zombies, machine guns, and absolutely zero plot—and popped in the disk.
The computer whirred to life, lights blinking like it was about to launch missiles. The screen said it was installing and “needed to download a few files.” Fine. Normal.
Except what it meant was: “Surprise! This disk is just a shiny plastic coaster. We’re now going to download 87 quadrillion bytes of game data directly from the internet, using up ALL your bandwidth—and possibly the neighbor’s, too.”
And grandson? He went to bed.
Peacefully. Like a sweet, innocent child. A sweet, innocent child who had just lit my internet on fire, roasted marshmallows over it, and strolled away.
By the next morning, it was still downloading. And by the end of that day, WildBlue—our internet overlords—had had enough. They slapped us with a data violation and throttled our internet speed down to something that made dial-up look like a NASCAR race.
So now? I can check my email if I start at 6 a.m. and don’t mind waiting through 43 seconds of buffering per click. Watching a video? Please. I’d have better luck chiseling it into stone tablets and watching it rock-by-rock.
Click a news article? Sure—if I want to load the headline today and the story sometime next Thursday. And YouTube? That’s not even a website anymore—it’s a spinning wheel of dashed dreams.
So until our usage average dips below “acceptable” (which should happen sometime after the spring thaw), Grandson is on my list. The list. The “I love you dearly but also wouldn’t mind if you got a paper cut and spilled lemon juice in it” list.
What I’ve Learned:
Teenagers can build a supercomputer from scratch but think internet bandwidth is infinite, free, and magically produced by garden fairies.
“Install from disk” now means “Download the entire internet while Grandma sleeps.”
WildBlue has no heart, no soul, and apparently, no pity.
Never trust a tech-savvy teenager alone with a high-speed connection. It’s like handing a toddler a chainsaw and saying, “Be careful.”
And finally… even when they torch your internet and make your online life a living hell, if they take initiative, follow through, and pay you back—you keep ’em.
But you change the Wi-Fi password. . . and you don’t write it down.
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