Did You Ever Feel Like Killing a Teenager?

(No jury would convict you. Just sayin’.)

Okay, so you wouldn’t actually do it. But be honest—you’ve felt like it. We all have. If you’re a parent, grandparent, or unfortunate neighbor within a three-house 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, Nate, decided to build himself a computer. And I mean build one—from scratch. Like a nerdy Frankenstein, piecing together the motherboard, the CPU, and a graphics card large enough to power NORAD. Honestly, it was impressive. He spent hours researching, comparing specs, and watching tutorials online. I didn’t know whether to applaud or call in NASA.

Then he spent more hours on my computer using up my internet while he compared prices, checked compatibility, and watched more tech reviews than any human should. He even used my credit card—with my blessing—to order all the parts.

And I will say, 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.

So, being a new computer, it had no games. Which is apparently a violation of some sacred teenage law punishable by whining and sulking. So he bought his favorite game—no idea what it was, something probably involving zombies, machine guns, and 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 that it “needed to download a few files.” Fine. Normal.

Except what it meant was: “Surprise! This 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 Nate? He went to bed.

Peacefully. Like a sweet, innocent child. A sweet, innocent child who had just lit my internet on fire and walked 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 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 a stone tablet and watching it frame-by-frame.

Click a news article? Not unless I want to load the headline today and the story sometime next Thursday. And YouTube? That’s just a taunt now. A spinning wheel of dashed dreams.

So until our usage average dips below the acceptable level (which should happen sometime after the spring thaw), Nate 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:

1. Teenagers can build a supercomputer from scratch but don’t understand that internet bandwidth is not infinite, free, or grown in the garden out back.

2. “Install from disk” now means “Download the entire internet while Grandma sleeps.”

3. WildBlue has no heart, no soul, and apparently, no pity.

4. Never trust a tech-savvy teenager alone with a high-speed connection. It's like handing a toddler a chainsaw and saying, “Be careful.”

5. 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 don't write it down.

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