“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.”
The Echo in the Nest
Later that afternoon, while putting away laundry, I found one of Alex’s old photo albums tucked away on a shelf in the linen closet. I sank onto the floor of the hallway, the scent of cedar and clean towels around me, and opened it.
There he was. A gap-toothed seven-year-old, beaming with pride as he held up a drawing of a lopsided, six-legged dinosaur. I remembered that day. He’d spent hours on it, meticulously choosing the right crayons. When he showed it to me, he’d explained every detail—why the T-Rex had six legs (“for extra-fast running”), why it was purple (“because it’s the best color”). I had listened, captivated, and taped it to the fridge where it stayed for a year.
I turned the page. Alex at ten, his face a mask of intense concentration as he tried to teach me how to play his new Nintendo. He was so patient, his small finger guiding my clumsy thumb on the controller. “No, Mom, you have to press this button to jump,” he’d said, his voice earnest and sweet. “Don’t worry, you’ll get it. Let’s try again.”
I traced the glossy surface of the photograph. Where did that boy go? The one who was so eager to share his world with me, who never made me feel stupid for not understanding? He’d been replaced by this moody, contemptuous stranger who lived under my roof. A stranger who made me feel like a burden for asking the same kind of questions.
It was more than just the tech help. It was the way he spoke to me about everything. If I mentioned a movie I’d liked, he’d explain, with a world-weary sigh, why it was “thematically derivative.” If I cooked a meal he didn’t prefer, he wouldn’t just say so; he’d critique the “flavor profile” as if he were a Michelin-star judge. He’d become an expert on everything, and Tom and I were his clueless, analog students.
Tom called it a phase. “He’s just trying to find his footing, Maggie. It’s hard for them, this generation. The world is different.” I knew he was right, in a way. I knew Alex felt the pressure to succeed, the sting of living at home when all his online friends were posting pictures from their high-rise apartments in Austin or San Francisco.
But knowing the reason didn’t make the condescension any easier to swallow. It didn’t stop the quiet sting of his eye-rolls or the casual cruelty of his sighs. I closed the photo album, the image of my sweet, ten-year-old boy burning in my mind. The echo of that child made the man he’d become so much harder to bear. The nest felt emptier when he was a boy away at college than it did now, with him living in it.
The Digital Tollbooth
The unspoken contract in our house was that Alex’s technical support, begrudging as it was, came at a price. Not a monetary one—he paid no rent, no utilities, no grocery bills. No, the price was paid in servitude. Each time he deigned to fix one of our digital woes, it was followed by an implicit IOU.
The day after he fixed the printer, the bill came due. I was in the kitchen, planning a simple dinner of chicken and roasted vegetables, when he appeared. He leaned against the doorframe, scrolling on his phone.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked, his eyes still glued to the screen.
“I was thinking roasted chicken and some broccoli,” I said brightly.
He made a small noise in the back of his throat. “Eh.”
I waited. This was part of the ritual.
“I was kind of feeling like that lasagna you make,” he said. “The one with the béchamel sauce. And maybe some of that garlic bread with the real butter and parsley.”
My heart sank a little. That lasagna was an all-afternoon affair. It involved making two separate sauces from scratch, boiling noodles, grating a mountain of cheese, and an hour in the oven. It wasn’t a Tuesday night dinner. It was a special occasion meal.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know if I have time for that tonight,” I said. “I was going to work on the final submission for the grant.”
He finally looked up from his phone, and his expression was a carefully crafted masterpiece of disappointment. It was the look of a child who’d just been told Christmas was canceled. “Oh,” he said, his voice soft. “Okay. I guess chicken is fine.” He let the silence hang in the air, thick and heavy with my maternal guilt. He had, after all, saved me from the printer demon yesterday. He had rescued my proposal.
“It’s just… my gaming guild is doing a big raid tonight,” he added, a little more information to sweeten the pot of my obligation. “A big meal would be great for energy.”
Tom walked in then, catching the tail end of the conversation. “Lasagna sounds great!” he boomed, oblivious to the emotional transaction taking place. “What’s the occasion?”
Alex shrugged. “Just felt like it.” He gave me a quick, knowing look. The toll had been presented. All I had to do was pay it.
“Alright,” I sighed, pulling the ground beef from the freezer to defrost. “Lasagna it is.”
Alex’s face brightened instantly. “Awesome. Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.” He gave my shoulder a quick, perfunctory squeeze and then vanished back upstairs, the triumphant retreat of a master negotiator.
I stood in the kitchen, staring at the frozen block of meat. I wasn’t just his mother; I was his short-order cook, his laundress, and his on-call IT consultant’s assistant. And every time I needed help navigating the world he was an expert in, I had to pay a toll at his digital drawbridge. Tonight, the price was a four-hour cooking marathon. I started grating cheese, the rhythmic scrape of the block against the metal echoing the grating of my last nerve.
The Boiling Point: The Blue Screen of Dread
Friday arrived with a gray, drizzly sky that perfectly matched the anxiety churning in my stomach. The grant proposal was due by 5:00 PM. I’d spent the morning doing one last, meticulous proofread, polishing every sentence until it gleamed. This grant could mean the world to the community center—new kilns for the pottery studio, a proper stage for the youth theater group. It was more than just a document to me; it was a year’s worth of hope for a lot of people.
At 3:30 PM, I was ready. I had the final PDF saved to my desktop. I had the submission portal open in my web browser, the fields all filled out. All that was left to do was click ‘Attach File’ and then ‘Submit.’ I took a deep, steadying breath, positioning my cursor over the button.
And then it happened.
The screen flickered. A jumble of white text flashed against a terrifying, electric blue background. My laptop emitted a low, strangled buzzing sound, like a dying insect. The cursor was frozen. The clock in the corner of the screen was stuck at 3:31 PM. I stared, my blood turning to ice. The Blue Screen of Death. I’d seen it in movies, but never on my own computer. Not now. Not when everything was on the line.
Panic seized me, cold and absolute. I clicked the mouse. Nothing. I tapped the touchpad. Nothing. I pressed the escape key, then every other key I could think of. The blue screen remained, an unblinking, digital omen of failure.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I had an hour and a half. The only copy of the final, polished PDF was on this laptop’s desktop. I had earlier drafts saved to a cloud drive, but not this one. Not the perfect one.
I did the only thing I knew how to do. I held down the power button, praying to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in. The machine went dark. I counted to ten, my hands trembling, and pressed it again. The familiar startup chime was a small comfort, but it was short-lived. It booted up, but it was sluggish, agonizingly slow. When the desktop finally loaded, my background image of a serene beach was a cruel joke. I tried to open the web browser. The icon bounced for a full minute, then stopped. Frozen again.
A wave of nausea washed over me. I tried to open the file folder. Same result. The laptop was alive, but it was paralyzed. A prisoner in its own operating system. There was only one person in this house who could possibly navigate this technological hellscape. And asking him was going to be its own special kind of torture.
About the Author
