My daughter’s boyfriend sat at my dining room table, eating the shepherd’s pie I had just cooked, and announced that he and Chloe had *decided* to commandeer my garage for his personal weight room.
He had been a guest for “two weeks” that somehow became six months of muddy sneakers, stolen Wi-Fi, and lectures on how to properly load my dishwasher.
My husband preached patience while my daughter called me the villain. I was just the live-in cook and laundress who funded his budding career as a professional video game streamer.
What the wannabe crypto-bro failed to understand was that he was living in the house of a meticulous architect, and I was about to design his eviction with the same cold, technological precision I used for my blueprints.
The Trojan Horse Arrives: A Couple of Weeks
It started, as most disasters do, with a reasonable request. Josh stood in our entryway, hands shoved in his pockets, looking like a mournful giraffe. Behind him, my daughter, Chloe, wore the pleading expression she’d perfected at age six when she wanted a hamster.
“His lease is up at the end of the month,” Chloe explained, twisting a strand of her blonde hair. “And the new place he’s found with his buddy won’t be ready for, like, two weeks. Maybe three.”
Mark, my husband, the human embodiment of a shrug, was already nodding. “Of course, kiddo. The guest room is all yours.”
I felt a faint twitch behind my eye. I’m a freelance architect, and my office is a converted corner of our living room. My entire career is built on the precise understanding that a “couple of weeks” is a mythical unit of time, a contractor’s unicorn. It means “until a bigger problem arises.”
Josh smiled, a wide, guileless flash of teeth. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Gable. I really appreciate it. I’ll be totally out of your hair.”
He had two duffel bags and a video game console. That was it. He looked like he was here for a weekend, not a transitional life phase. It seemed so simple, so manageable. A temporary inconvenience to help our daughter’s serious boyfriend. A good deed. But as I watched him track mud onto the welcome mat I’d just shaken out that morning, I had the distinct feeling I’d just cheerfully unlocked the gates to the city of Troy.
A Study in Domestic Entropy
The first week was a study in minor incursions. His size-twelve sneakers, which always seemed to be damp, formed a permanent, sprawling colony by the front door. I’d line them up neatly against the wall in the morning, and by noon they’d have multiplied and scattered again, like a fungal bloom.
Then came the battle for the thermostat, a silent, passive-aggressive war waged in degrees. I’d set it to a sensible 68. An hour later, a tropical heat would wash over me as I tried to focus on blueprints, and I’d find the dial cranked to 74. He was always cold, he’d explain, wearing nothing but basketball shorts and a thin t-shirt. I’d just smile tightly and nudge it back down.
His presence was… loud. Not just the thumping bass from his headphones that you could feel through the floorboards, but the sheer volume of his existence. The way he’d open and close the fridge door five times in ten minutes, each time letting it swing shut with a resounding thud that rattled the magnets. The way he’d talk to his friends on speakerphone while pacing the length of the living room, directly behind my desk.
“Bro, no way she said that. That’s savage,” he’d bellow, oblivious to the fact that I was in the middle of a client call, trying to sound professional while a one-sided soap opera unfolded three feet away. I took to wearing noise-canceling headphones, but I could still feel the vibrations of his conversations in my teeth.
The Wi-Fi Is Not a Public Utility
My professional life is entirely dependent on a stable internet connection. I upload and download massive design files, conduct video conferences, and run complex rendering software. Our Wi-Fi plan, which I researched and selected with the meticulousness of a surgeon, was robust. Or so I thought.
By the second week, it began to shudder and lag. My screen would freeze mid-call, my face contorted into a pixelated mask of frustration. Uploads that should have taken minutes crawled for an hour. At first, I blamed the service provider, spending a mortifying forty-five minutes on the phone with a very patient tech support agent who walked me through a dozen system resets.
“Ma’am,” he said finally, his voice gentle. “I’m looking at your bandwidth usage right now. It looks like one device is consuming about eighty percent of your total capacity. Is someone… gaming, perhaps?”
I walked into the guest room, now colloquially known as “Josh’s Lair.” He was hunched over his monitor, headset on, bathed in the lurid purple glow of his screen. He was screaming instructions to unseen comrades. “Push, push! Revive me, you idiot!” He was, it turned out, a semi-professional streamer. It wasn’t just a hobby; it was an all-day, all-night bandwidth holocaust.
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