Perhaps, as parents, me and Him Indoors have just been unlucky as we stumble from one upturned internet e-rake to another, but I maintain everyone who opted to procreate around the millennium and and allows their kids a modicum of freedom will have tripped on occasion.
It’s because we are riding into the dawn of a new era. No one has gone before us. How were we supposed to know? Every age has it’s idiots. We are the digital equivalent of the parents that left the walker with the wheels on the top landing of the stairs, or gave the tween lawn darts or had a liquor cabinet and teenagers and a weekend away with “Auntie Joonie” in charge.
We hail from a time when we thought we had it all dialled up by listening to kindly experts that advised us to ensure the computer screen was publicly visible in the house? That was before everyone got their own tiny private password protected screen. The experts try to keep up, bleating on about “screen time” and “moderation”. But soon their wise words will be lost in the thunder of the stampede to update our collective status.
1) Ipods Shatter
Turns out iPod covers are uncool like warm-lined jackets in the winter. No teenager wants to wear them. One can only hope condoms fare better for this generation or there will be a baby boom in three years (at least … please god at least).
The first time an iPod is dropped on an unforgiving floor it is a disaster. Everyone stands around in a stricken circle and a lot of Googling takes place before the poor damaged body is gently placed in the hands of an Apple Store.
The second time you find a guy that fixes them for twenty bucks.
The third time you all shrug and ignore it and they carry on with a cracked screen like everyone else until they drop it in the toilet and have to fall back on an ancient iPad for entertainment. Just like babies and soothers…If soother’s cost $300.
2) There are Un-Appetizing purchases
It was so lovely to see the kids laughing and huddled together playing Tap Zoo. I really try to think back to those times without prejudice but their innocent glee over their new animal creations is somewhat marred by the bloodlust that rises simultaneously when I recall the $500 charge for snowflakes on the Visa Bill.
$500 dollars for virtual snowflakes.
These intangible snowflakes allowed them to breed mixes of animals. They bred a tiger with a lion which quite frankly we already fecking know is a liger.
In those days of astounding stupidity we still had a card attached to iTunes without a password no one can remember. The kids excuse? “We didn’t know it was real money!”
Well no sweetie it wasn’t really real, it was magic credit card money which we probably consolidated twice and then rolled into the mortgage. But we do disallow in-app purchases.
3) Customizing is forever
Your kid has a friend, let’s call them “Alex” but they go ahead and change “Alex” to “Booboo” (*) on their iPod. For some reason this extends to icloud. The reason every device in the house is under one icloud name is that you couldn’t be bothered upgrading Cat Toys Lite twice on separate accounts. This was a big big mistake…Huge…Like a Julia Roberts shopkeeper snob big. So the icloud permeates every machine in the house. You only discover this when Him Indoors posts something about a hockey player on Twitter and it reads that he hopes “Booboo Galchenyuk is back in the lineup tonight”. Luckily all the Alexes in your life move on and you forget all about it until you are texting a note to a musician after a one-minute conversation over booking a gig and Bam, back comes Booboo. This is the note I sent
“Hey Booboo, please send me your bio and hired photos so I can put them in the press release.”
* Every time I type Booboo the iCloud changes it to Booboo so I can’t type Booboo ever because…well just look back at this sentence. I type A..l..e..x and I look up and it says Booboo. I change it back to Booboo and as soon as I hit the spacebar and voila!… Booboo. She doesn’t even like Booboo anymore.
* Even now it wants to change it. Right now I am being prompted.
4) Mother Bear Vs The MMORPG Call Centre
So your kid plays National Geographic’s Animal Jam and has a lot of fun there frolicking among the other fuzzy animals that wear clothes and decorate their dens and talk utter drivel while they trade hats and shoes. Until one dark day when her belongings are jacked by another player who pretends to be her friend and then entices her password and steal all her stuff. There is no recourse because even though the items are virtual there is no way to just have them reappear. Then you read a bit about it as if you are a good parent albeit retroactively and realize your child is dangerously addicted to a multiplayer online role playing game aka a MMORPG. You call and a friendly young man apologizes for the experience and explains gently that she broke some confidentiality rules and you should remind her of these. So embarrassed you go away and have a chat about the real world and scams and how every grifter worth their salt knows a sucker when they sees one and sure as shit if someone bets you that eyeballs gonna jump up outta that glass that sure it will and don’t take no fool bet…(*)
Anyways, you soon become a regular caller sticking out the sweaty eared minutes it takes to connect and mainlining the jungle-themed music and animal noises designed to make you realize you are in fact holding for a child’s online game and not a real important issue. You also instinctively realize there is a chart in a Salt Lake City strip mall where the college students on headsets stick impressions of overbearing mom-haired cartoons drawings and your name is on one of them….Which they will laugh at until work is over and they all head out to the Green Pig Pub. The humiliation is eternal.
* Okay that was Ring Lardner
5) A case of mistaken identity crisis
When the iPad is being used as back-up and the iCloud is treating us all like Borgs who like someone called Booboo you must be reasonably certain before speaking out that you are operating as yourself. As we habitually sign into each others devices like lazy cyber-lions resting on familiar haunches it is bound to come back to tail swish us in the face. I probably surprised my daughter’s 2,000 followers with a sudden departure in tone talking about The Kinks amid a roll call of the usual rubbish. But I am 100 per cent sure no one was as surprised as the followers of Him Indoors, a die-hard Habs fan, when he suddenly proclaimed quite a carnal sort of lust for Ottawa Senators Captain Eric Karlsson. I will let his retraction speak for itself.
“In case anyone wonders about my Karlsson tweet last night. My daughter did it. While I respect him as a player, my feelings go no further.”
oonawoods 
Leave a comment