“Figure it out yourself for once,” he snapped, and the bedroom door clicked shut, leaving me alone in the hallway with my dead laptop and a grant proposal due in less than an hour.
My son, Alex, the 25-year-old master of a digital universe he built in my guest room, had just declared me obsolete.
He lived under my roof, ate my food, and used the high-speed internet I paid for to mock me for not understanding it.
But he made one critical, analog error.
He assumed the person who signs the checks for his precious gigabit connection was too stupid to find the master switch.
So I was about to unplug his entire digital existence, and the only way he could get it back was by correctly answering a question from a 1980s Trivial Pursuit card I still had memorized.
My 25-Year-Old Son Mocked Me for My Lack of Tech Skills While Living in My House Rent-Free, So I Changed the Wi-Fi Password to the Answer of a 1980s Trivial Pursuit Question and Watched Him Melt Down.
The Slow Simmer: The Patron Saint of Buffering
The little circle spun on the television screen, a tiny, taunting vortex of digital purgatory. It had been spinning for three minutes, long enough for my husband, Tom, to give up and retreat to the garage to tinker with his perpetually disassembled lawnmower. But I was determined. We were paying for seven different streaming services; one of them had to work.
I aimed the remote, a sleek black wand with more buttons than a pilot’s cockpit, and pressed ‘Exit.’ Nothing. I pressed ‘Home.’ The spinning circle hiccupped, then resumed its hypnotic dance. A deep sigh escaped my lungs, the kind that feels like it’s deflating your soul.
“Alex?” I called out, my voice aiming for casual but landing somewhere near ‘desperate plea.’
The only answer was the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a bass line seeping through the floor from his bedroom directly above the living room. It was the soundtrack to my growing inadequacy. Alex, my 25-year-old son, had moved back in six months ago after finishing his master’s degree in something incomprehensibly digital. He was “building his portfolio” and “networking online” before launching his career. In the meantime, his physical presence was a monument to dirty laundry and his digital presence was a constant, humming reminder of my own obsolescence.
“Alex, honey, can you give me a hand with the TV?” I called again, louder this time. The thumping stopped. A moment later, his footsteps creaked on the stairs. He appeared in the doorway, a tall, lanky silhouette backlit by the hallway light. He was holding his phone, his thumb still swiping. He didn’t look at me, but at the television.
“What’s it doing now?” he asked, his tone flat. It was the voice of a man being asked to solve world hunger during his lunch break.
“It’s just… stuck,” I said, gesturing with the remote. “I tried to open the Max app, and now it’s just buffering.”
He let out a long, theatrical sigh. “Mom, did you try turning it off and on again? The actual TV? Unplugging it from the wall?” He spoke slowly, carefully enunciating each word as if I were a tourist with a flimsy grasp of the local language.
“Yes, Alex. I did the unplugging thing. It didn’t work.”
He walked over, took the remote from my hand without making eye contact, and started pressing a rapid, arcane sequence of buttons. The screen flickered, went black, then lit up with the TV’s logo. “You’re probably overwhelming the processor,” he mumbled, more to the screen than to me. “You can’t just click on everything. You have to give it a second to think.”
The home screen appeared, crisp and functional. He navigated to the app and opened it. It loaded instantly. He tossed the remote onto the couch cushion beside me. “There. Just be patient with it. It’s not a race.” He turned and started walking away.
A spike of frustration, hot and sharp, pricked at my chest. “Thank you,” I said, the words tight. “I have that big grant proposal for the Community Arts Foundation due on Friday. I was hoping to relax for a bit before I get back to it.” I said it to his back, a flimsy attempt to remind him that my life also contained deadlines and stress.
He paused at the bottom of the stairs but didn’t turn around. “Yeah, well, try not to break it again before then.” The floorboards creaked as he ascended back to his world, and a moment later, the thump-thump-thump resumed. I stared at the perfectly functioning television, feeling like I’d just been scolded for touching an exhibit in a museum. A museum I owned.
A Language I Don’t Speak
The next morning, the enemy was the printer. It sat on my desk, a beige plastic box, its single green light blinking with what I could only interpret as malice. The grant proposal was finished—all twenty-seven pages of budgets, artist statements, and community impact reports. All I had to do was print a hard copy for my files before submitting it digitally.
The printer, however, had other ideas. It had accepted the command from my laptop, whirred and clicked with promising mechanical noises, and then produced a single sheet of paper with a cryptic line of code at the top: “ERROR: 0x00000709.”
I tried everything I could think of. I canceled the print job. I restarted my laptop. I opened and closed the printer, checking for a paper jam that wasn’t there. The blinking green light mocked me. I felt that familiar, sinking feeling, a mix of helplessness and humiliation. It was like standing in a foreign country, needing to ask for directions, but knowing you didn’t have the words.
Tom found me staring at it when he came in from his morning walk. “Trouble in paradise?” he asked, kissing the top of my head.
“This thing is a demon,” I muttered. “It won’t print my proposal. I’m getting an error code.”
Tom, bless his heart, was even less tech-savvy than I was. He squinted at the printer as if it were a misbehaving dog. “Did you jiggle the cords?” That was his solution for everything from a faulty lamp to a car that wouldn’t start.
When the cord-jiggling failed, he sighed. “I guess we’ll have to call in the expert.” He headed for the stairs. “Alex! Your mother requires your services!”
The groan from upstairs was audible. This time, Alex descended with the weariness of a man summoned from a great and important labor. He was wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt with a picture of a pixelated sword on it. His hair was a mess.
He didn’t greet us, just stalked over to my desk and peered at my laptop screen. “What’s the issue?”
“It won’t print,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “It keeps giving me this error.”
He leaned in, his eyes scanning the screen. He let out a short, sharp huff of air through his nose, the universal sound for “honestly, this again?” “Okay, so, the spooler service is probably corrupted. You need to go into the services manager, stop the print spooler, clear the cache in the System32 folder, and then restart it. Simple.” He said it all in one breath, a firehose of jargon that left me soaked and confused.
He saw the blank look on my face. His shoulders slumped in performative exasperation. “Look, just move.” He nudged me out of my own desk chair. His fingers flew across the keyboard, a flurry of clicks and clacks. Windows I’d never seen before opened and closed. In less than thirty seconds, he hit ‘Print.’ The printer whirred to life and began spitting out pages.
“It’s not that hard, Mom,” he said, getting up. “You just have to try to keep up.” He looked at Tom. “She needs a new laptop. This thing is ancient.”
“It’s only three years old,” I protested weakly.
“In tech years, that’s a dinosaur,” he shot back, already halfway out the door. “And for God’s sake, learn the keyboard shortcuts. You’re still using your mouse to copy and paste.” He disappeared up the stairs before I could form a response. I just stood there, clutching the warm, freshly printed pages of my proposal, the smell of ink mingling with the bitter scent of my own inadequacy. Tom patted my shoulder. “He’s a good kid,” he said quietly. “Just… speaks a different language.”
About the Author
