Sorry About That...
Jul 4, 2017, 4:00 am
#31
Moderator, Trip Reports
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Denver, CO
Programs: UA GS-2MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 3,715
If I’m honest, the meal on the flight to MEL wasn’t that bad. It was in fact edible. My daughter resigned herself to the fact that she was stuck beside me for the 15 hrs and that if she put her headphones in, her eye mask thingy on and converted her seat into a bed, she might forget that I was there.
I was also dead beat so was quite looking forward to catching up on some sleep.
Sadly, there wasn’t wifi on the flight (did they ever have it?) I think at some point that they did.
I managed to sleep for at least 7 hrs – which in our family is a record. My own mother sleeps with one eye open in case she misses something in the night.
Teenagers on the other hand can sleep for days. For those of you not based in Trump-ville, you need to know that this particular time of the year is the worst time for parents. It is the dreaded summer holidays. A break that literally drags on for eternity.
At the start, parents are quite excited and happy to have their offspring at home. Mom’s are driving their kids around in their minivans, singing and clapping, their kids are mildly interested in what Mom or Dad has to say and as we all say in The Land of The President With Bad Hair, we are living the proverbial American dream.
However it’s not a dream at all. It’s a hologram for a train crash. A very big one. Fast forward the tape and in around 8 weeks, you will see stories on the news where slightly plump soccer mums in their tennis gear went postal in the grocery store and tried to insert both her kids in the machine that makes peanut butter out of the raw material.
Or something like this.
The stranger thing is the Mom isn’t even arrested. She is led away by someone wearing a health and safety vest, clutching a vodka and soda and there are pictures of her kids being led away in an Animal Control pick up (you know the ones with a cage on the back) holding the middle finger to the local channel 5 news anchor. And urinating on the cameraman.
It’s not pretty. It really isn’t. School holidays strikes fear into every parent in the USA. Guaranteed.
I got a taste of what was to come a few weeks ago. My wife has been complaining that her children have become zombies, captured by the digital age. As you now know, one blurts the word “Yeet” all the time and the older child has lost the ability to communicate at all and just grunts and only appears from his room in the basement when he is hungry. Or the internet breaks.
Which brings me neatly to this story.
We live in a relatively small town in Colorado. 93,000 people according to the last census. Or survey. Take your pick.
Anyway, not so long ago, some enterprising young person decided to start a trendy tech company, which was going to install a ballistic missile fast fiber network and one which would provide lightning fast internet speeds to the whole community.
People waited with baited breath.
They waited some more. And then the little tech company rudely ran out of money and the 22 year old who ran the thing promptly jumped on a plane to Puerto Vallarta and was never seen or heard of again.
Much to the amazement of the community, the actual City stepped in and said that they would finish the network and buy the assets of the failed little start up. Which is basically like the Pope saying he is going to now take over changing all the candles in the Vatican.
We all pulled up a chair and poured ourselves a very tall bourbon. This would be fun to watch we all said to ourselves.
When the thing was finished, people actually started buying this new Internet service and then the rumors dissipated into a raw truth that this new offering was in fact the ducks guts (Aussie for brilliant).
Sadly, our son got wind of this. Faster Internet speeds to a 16 year old teenager who spends most of his waking life playing video games is like a new drug. He was addicted at the telemarketers “hello”
Unbeknown to my slightly unhinged wife and I, our enterprising young son had taken matters into his own hands and ordered the service without us knowing.
Except for one thing. When they come to “install” this new pipe, they basically have to rip up your entire back yard to run a physical cable to your house.
My son decided that on the day of the installation – he was in fact needed at home to supervise the swarm of people the city had outsourced the last mile to. School was nothing but a distraction on a day this important.
I remember pulling into our humble abode and seeing a bevy of workman like trucks parked in the drive and out on the street. My son was out in the yard waving his arms and speaking fluent Spanish. My wife and I were literally gobsmacked as the child barely speaks English, let alone another language.
Lets just say that things had not gone well. In the workman’s haste to install the cable, they had inadvertently ripped into a sprinkler line and water started going everywhere. The workers, following the time tested guide for all illegal workers in the US, rapidly ran into the proverbial weeds and were never to be seen of again.
The back yard looked like Beirut. There was a huge trench from the back fence to the house. A lot of impressive digger looking machines were simply left where they were, a huge roll of cable which had the City Of X stamped to the side of it was left to one side and our moron child was standing there blurting out the word…
“What?”
“Explain yourself”
“Um, were getting new internet”
“Ah good, I thought you had ordered a new pool”
“What?”
“Never mind”
“And prey tell, why is there a huge trench in your mothers back yard?”
“It will buff out”
“What!”
“It will be fine. Calm the farm Dad…”
My idiot child has this maddening habit of telling his mother and I to “calm the farm” whenever he thinks were about to blow a fuse. Which happens more frequently now.
“I’ll show you calm the farm. Who’s going to fix all this mess?”
There was that useless shrug of the shoulders followed by the equally vacant “I dunno” answer.
In the end, more men rolled up and the water subsided, my wife calmed down and the little Internet that could, finally started working. Like crazy in fact. Performance is off the charts.
We have a permanent speed bump in the yard to remind ourselves of the damage which the mower has now neatly leveled out – and there is in fact, a neat landing strip going from one side of the lawn to the other.
“How much does this new wifi thing cost?” I demanded
“No idea” grunts the child
“What?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t tell me”
“Well how did you order it?”
“Online. And then I had to talk to someone”
“Didn’t they need our permission?”
“Yes”
“Well who gave it to them?”
“I did”
The problem is that the person selling the Internet service probably had kids too and couldn’t be bothered arguing with the dimwitted teenager on the other end of the phone.
Which is another thing that drives me crazy. Kids and phones. And specifically their ability to actually use them as a telephone.
“Son, call your mother”
“I sent her a text”
“Call her”
“Why?”
“Because I said so”
“I don’t want to”
“Why not? She made you”
“That’s gross”
“Look you idiot, call her now”
Much fumbling around with the phone and then he hands it to me…
“No you speak to her”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes”
“But what am I going to say?”
“I don’t know – how about you start with the time tested word called Hello”
“You know this would have been easier in a text”
And there you have it. Young people have literally forgotten how to actually talk on the phone.
I then asked the moron son how on earth he expected to get a girlfriend.
“I’ve got one”
“Really. Whats her name? Robert?”
He ignores my insult.
“Yes but we broke up”
“Really”
“How did you break up with her?”
“I sent her a text”
“You sent her a text”
“Yes”
“How did that work out for you?”
“Not well”
“You’re an idiot”
Anyway, after all the kerfuffle died down about our new internet service, my current wife lost it one night and demanded that the kids hand over their phones and sit down at the dinner table and have a conversation with her.
They both looked at her in the same way that they looked at me when they saw me naked on the toilet a few months back. (Look there’s a particularly dodgy burrito truck I go to not far from me, but the thing is while their Asada Burritos are probably the best thing you will ever eat, its not pretty a few hours later and the safest way to handle things is to strip naked, find a large candle and some matches, enter the bathroom with an oxygen mask and then perform your ablutions). You asked.
I was out the night that this all went down. I forgot where. Probably at the local bar. I get home quite late and see my wife in bed with the 2 dogs and she’s clutching something. To my amazement it’s not a bottle of hard liquor. To my surprise it’s the cable off the wifi router.
“Honey what’s wrong?”
“Your children are driving me crazy with their phones”
“Why are you holding that cable?”
“Because I am teaching them a lesson and I disconnected the wifi”
“Really, you disconnected it?”
“Yes”
“Well, why is the house lit up like a Christmas tree. There are strange kids watching Netflix in the living room, your son is in the basement playing some killing game with a Russian kid called Vladamir and your daughter and her friends, when quizzed what they were doing all yelled out in unison “watching German porn””
My wife did in fact rip the cable from the router. But she is no match for a 16-year old boy who lives and breathes the internet. I am convinced he has built some self healing network below the bowels of our house and removing one cable simply set off some warning light on one of the 3 computer screens he has and he would have literally walked 10 feet to a box, grabbed a new cable and would have had the network up and running faster than Pablo Escobars IT guy…
Talking of efficiencies I read recently that the Aussie government has decided to do away with those pesky arrival and departure forms that were mildly annoying. Probably because most Aussies on their return into the country are badly hung over and have trouble remembering their own name, let alone where they have been, whether or not they have ever had foot and mouth disease, who they slept with while they were abroad and what their religion is.
Actually talking of religion the Australian government are quite unhappy with the state of affairs as it relates to the national census. This is a document they send out every few years and its supposed to keep all the government men with cardigans happy – because they get to ask every householder stupidly inane questions.
Anyway, they’ve had to seriously do away with asking people what religion they are because in the last census, 56,000 people put down “Jedi” when asked what their faith was.
I think this is a good thing. From a travelers perspective, the less paperwork the better.
I have no idea how we got to this point but I will tell you that after a week with my completely mad mother, I am ready for the next leg. And the next leg is a quick trip to HKG, a stop for the night and a catch up with an old friend from Singapore (who now lives in HKG) and then a lovely, soothing, solo flight on my own on CX F to LAX…
No idea where my daughter is going to be. But hey, my job was to get her here. From A to B. I have nothing to do with C…
I was also dead beat so was quite looking forward to catching up on some sleep.
Sadly, there wasn’t wifi on the flight (did they ever have it?) I think at some point that they did.
I managed to sleep for at least 7 hrs – which in our family is a record. My own mother sleeps with one eye open in case she misses something in the night.
Teenagers on the other hand can sleep for days. For those of you not based in Trump-ville, you need to know that this particular time of the year is the worst time for parents. It is the dreaded summer holidays. A break that literally drags on for eternity.
At the start, parents are quite excited and happy to have their offspring at home. Mom’s are driving their kids around in their minivans, singing and clapping, their kids are mildly interested in what Mom or Dad has to say and as we all say in The Land of The President With Bad Hair, we are living the proverbial American dream.
However it’s not a dream at all. It’s a hologram for a train crash. A very big one. Fast forward the tape and in around 8 weeks, you will see stories on the news where slightly plump soccer mums in their tennis gear went postal in the grocery store and tried to insert both her kids in the machine that makes peanut butter out of the raw material.
Or something like this.
The stranger thing is the Mom isn’t even arrested. She is led away by someone wearing a health and safety vest, clutching a vodka and soda and there are pictures of her kids being led away in an Animal Control pick up (you know the ones with a cage on the back) holding the middle finger to the local channel 5 news anchor. And urinating on the cameraman.
It’s not pretty. It really isn’t. School holidays strikes fear into every parent in the USA. Guaranteed.
I got a taste of what was to come a few weeks ago. My wife has been complaining that her children have become zombies, captured by the digital age. As you now know, one blurts the word “Yeet” all the time and the older child has lost the ability to communicate at all and just grunts and only appears from his room in the basement when he is hungry. Or the internet breaks.
Which brings me neatly to this story.
We live in a relatively small town in Colorado. 93,000 people according to the last census. Or survey. Take your pick.
Anyway, not so long ago, some enterprising young person decided to start a trendy tech company, which was going to install a ballistic missile fast fiber network and one which would provide lightning fast internet speeds to the whole community.
People waited with baited breath.
They waited some more. And then the little tech company rudely ran out of money and the 22 year old who ran the thing promptly jumped on a plane to Puerto Vallarta and was never seen or heard of again.
Much to the amazement of the community, the actual City stepped in and said that they would finish the network and buy the assets of the failed little start up. Which is basically like the Pope saying he is going to now take over changing all the candles in the Vatican.
We all pulled up a chair and poured ourselves a very tall bourbon. This would be fun to watch we all said to ourselves.
When the thing was finished, people actually started buying this new Internet service and then the rumors dissipated into a raw truth that this new offering was in fact the ducks guts (Aussie for brilliant).
Sadly, our son got wind of this. Faster Internet speeds to a 16 year old teenager who spends most of his waking life playing video games is like a new drug. He was addicted at the telemarketers “hello”
Unbeknown to my slightly unhinged wife and I, our enterprising young son had taken matters into his own hands and ordered the service without us knowing.
Except for one thing. When they come to “install” this new pipe, they basically have to rip up your entire back yard to run a physical cable to your house.
My son decided that on the day of the installation – he was in fact needed at home to supervise the swarm of people the city had outsourced the last mile to. School was nothing but a distraction on a day this important.
I remember pulling into our humble abode and seeing a bevy of workman like trucks parked in the drive and out on the street. My son was out in the yard waving his arms and speaking fluent Spanish. My wife and I were literally gobsmacked as the child barely speaks English, let alone another language.
Lets just say that things had not gone well. In the workman’s haste to install the cable, they had inadvertently ripped into a sprinkler line and water started going everywhere. The workers, following the time tested guide for all illegal workers in the US, rapidly ran into the proverbial weeds and were never to be seen of again.
The back yard looked like Beirut. There was a huge trench from the back fence to the house. A lot of impressive digger looking machines were simply left where they were, a huge roll of cable which had the City Of X stamped to the side of it was left to one side and our moron child was standing there blurting out the word…
“What?”
“Explain yourself”
“Um, were getting new internet”
“Ah good, I thought you had ordered a new pool”
“What?”
“Never mind”
“And prey tell, why is there a huge trench in your mothers back yard?”
“It will buff out”
“What!”
“It will be fine. Calm the farm Dad…”
My idiot child has this maddening habit of telling his mother and I to “calm the farm” whenever he thinks were about to blow a fuse. Which happens more frequently now.
“I’ll show you calm the farm. Who’s going to fix all this mess?”
There was that useless shrug of the shoulders followed by the equally vacant “I dunno” answer.
In the end, more men rolled up and the water subsided, my wife calmed down and the little Internet that could, finally started working. Like crazy in fact. Performance is off the charts.
We have a permanent speed bump in the yard to remind ourselves of the damage which the mower has now neatly leveled out – and there is in fact, a neat landing strip going from one side of the lawn to the other.
“How much does this new wifi thing cost?” I demanded
“No idea” grunts the child
“What?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t tell me”
“Well how did you order it?”
“Online. And then I had to talk to someone”
“Didn’t they need our permission?”
“Yes”
“Well who gave it to them?”
“I did”
The problem is that the person selling the Internet service probably had kids too and couldn’t be bothered arguing with the dimwitted teenager on the other end of the phone.
Which is another thing that drives me crazy. Kids and phones. And specifically their ability to actually use them as a telephone.
“Son, call your mother”
“I sent her a text”
“Call her”
“Why?”
“Because I said so”
“I don’t want to”
“Why not? She made you”
“That’s gross”
“Look you idiot, call her now”
Much fumbling around with the phone and then he hands it to me…
“No you speak to her”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes”
“But what am I going to say?”
“I don’t know – how about you start with the time tested word called Hello”
“You know this would have been easier in a text”
And there you have it. Young people have literally forgotten how to actually talk on the phone.
I then asked the moron son how on earth he expected to get a girlfriend.
“I’ve got one”
“Really. Whats her name? Robert?”
He ignores my insult.
“Yes but we broke up”
“Really”
“How did you break up with her?”
“I sent her a text”
“You sent her a text”
“Yes”
“How did that work out for you?”
“Not well”
“You’re an idiot”
Anyway, after all the kerfuffle died down about our new internet service, my current wife lost it one night and demanded that the kids hand over their phones and sit down at the dinner table and have a conversation with her.
They both looked at her in the same way that they looked at me when they saw me naked on the toilet a few months back. (Look there’s a particularly dodgy burrito truck I go to not far from me, but the thing is while their Asada Burritos are probably the best thing you will ever eat, its not pretty a few hours later and the safest way to handle things is to strip naked, find a large candle and some matches, enter the bathroom with an oxygen mask and then perform your ablutions). You asked.
I was out the night that this all went down. I forgot where. Probably at the local bar. I get home quite late and see my wife in bed with the 2 dogs and she’s clutching something. To my amazement it’s not a bottle of hard liquor. To my surprise it’s the cable off the wifi router.
“Honey what’s wrong?”
“Your children are driving me crazy with their phones”
“Why are you holding that cable?”
“Because I am teaching them a lesson and I disconnected the wifi”
“Really, you disconnected it?”
“Yes”
“Well, why is the house lit up like a Christmas tree. There are strange kids watching Netflix in the living room, your son is in the basement playing some killing game with a Russian kid called Vladamir and your daughter and her friends, when quizzed what they were doing all yelled out in unison “watching German porn””
My wife did in fact rip the cable from the router. But she is no match for a 16-year old boy who lives and breathes the internet. I am convinced he has built some self healing network below the bowels of our house and removing one cable simply set off some warning light on one of the 3 computer screens he has and he would have literally walked 10 feet to a box, grabbed a new cable and would have had the network up and running faster than Pablo Escobars IT guy…
Talking of efficiencies I read recently that the Aussie government has decided to do away with those pesky arrival and departure forms that were mildly annoying. Probably because most Aussies on their return into the country are badly hung over and have trouble remembering their own name, let alone where they have been, whether or not they have ever had foot and mouth disease, who they slept with while they were abroad and what their religion is.
Actually talking of religion the Australian government are quite unhappy with the state of affairs as it relates to the national census. This is a document they send out every few years and its supposed to keep all the government men with cardigans happy – because they get to ask every householder stupidly inane questions.
Anyway, they’ve had to seriously do away with asking people what religion they are because in the last census, 56,000 people put down “Jedi” when asked what their faith was.
I think this is a good thing. From a travelers perspective, the less paperwork the better.
I have no idea how we got to this point but I will tell you that after a week with my completely mad mother, I am ready for the next leg. And the next leg is a quick trip to HKG, a stop for the night and a catch up with an old friend from Singapore (who now lives in HKG) and then a lovely, soothing, solo flight on my own on CX F to LAX…
No idea where my daughter is going to be. But hey, my job was to get her here. From A to B. I have nothing to do with C…
Jul 4, 2017, 9:19 am
#35
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: Indonesia
Posts: 361
if some of commenters thought your previous TRs worth published as book, I think this one can be adapted into movie! (or sitcom at least)
it also reminds me that my parents have similar problem with my youngest brother.
it also reminds me that my parents have similar problem with my youngest brother.
Jul 4, 2017, 10:47 am
#36
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: BOS
Programs: Hyatt Discoverist, Marriott/SPG/Hilton Gold, PreCheck + Clear
Posts: 2,306
Seriously great stuff. You should write professionally, though I admit this bit made me cringe:
Goading your teenage son by joking that he's gay? Then gleefully retelling the "insult" to strangers online, some of whom are in fact gay?
Jul 4, 2017, 2:54 pm
#40
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Feb 2012
Programs: AAdvantage Executive Platinum, Delta Silver Medallion, Marriott Bonvoy Ambassador
Posts: 14,106
eightblack is back!!!! Hooray!!!!!
Sitting back with a cup of tea to read this . . .
The first post is reminiscent of when my husband asked my father for my hand in marriage:
"That's all you want? Her hand?" Looking over at my mother, "We can finally start saving for retirement, honey! That poor guy, OTOH . . . " And, finally, "Congratulations, _______. You are a very lucky man." And then, in his best Last Crusade imitation, "You have chosen . . . wisely."
Sitting back with a cup of tea to read this . . .
The first post is reminiscent of when my husband asked my father for my hand in marriage:
"That's all you want? Her hand?" Looking over at my mother, "We can finally start saving for retirement, honey! That poor guy, OTOH . . . " And, finally, "Congratulations, _______. You are a very lucky man." And then, in his best Last Crusade imitation, "You have chosen . . . wisely."
Jul 4, 2017, 7:53 pm
#43
Join Date: May 2001
Posts: 4,772
Thrilled to see the paddles worked on eightblack, and what a comeback it is, probably the funniest thing I've read on here. My own cost centers are a bit older, 18 and 21 but unfortunately I have to tell you.... it doesn't get any better.
Jul 4, 2017, 9:18 pm
#44
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: New York, NY
Programs: AA Gold. UA Silver, Marriott Gold, Hilton Diamond, Hyatt (Lifetime Diamond downgraded to Explorist)
Posts: 6,776
Jul 4, 2017, 10:03 pm
#45
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 2,304
My wife did in fact rip the cable from the router. But she is no match for a 16-year old boy who lives and breathes the internet. I am convinced he has built some self healing network below the bowels of our house and removing one cable simply set off some warning light on one of the 3 computer screens he has and he would have literally walked 10 feet to a box, grabbed a new cable and would have had the network up and running faster than Pablo Escobars IT guy…