Future Shock

My son and I were at the mall last night and he wanted to stop at the game store. Behind the counter was your average 20-something burnout eating a bag of chips. He followed us around awhile, crunching, and giving me all the scoop on the latest and greatest games out (because I must have had a face that looked like I wanted to know?). After hearing about his life and his debt and his highest score on Zelda.... we finally get to that his father used to ground him by taking away his computer. OH! I say, wouldn't it have been easier to just take the mouse and keyboard away? Proudly he looks (up) at me and says, "Well, then I would have just used the TAB button!" He must have had one of those rare models that built it onto the monitor?

Next he tells me how computer savy his father has become, but not until after he built his computer. $400! He tells me, $400! And it's worth at least $1000! My, he is proud, but after being forced to listen to his life story and all of the things he buys his girlfriend, I was feeling less than patient. While silently wishing the son would hurry up already, I take a deep breath and ...

I cock my head and say, "Well that must have an AMD for $400, eh? What speed?." Slightly bewildered because I was wearing heels instead of my pocket protector, he recovers and sticks out his chest to say, "YES! An AMD Athlon 1400."

"Oh then its a few years old because mine is a 2600 and a few years old." He doesn't get it and drones on about how hard it was to find a motherboard for it because it is so FASTTT. I suggest he try the dumpsters behind the schools. Still not getting it, I shuffle the boy to the door where he stops to gawk at the XBox 360. Our helpful salesman is tell me how it's $400 and the new Playstation will be $600 and he's going to buy (fill-in-the-blank) because he has a compulsive spending problem. I suggest nicely that he invest in a better graphics card and just play pc games because you can at least download them.

Ut oh! No, he says he can't do that, then he'd have to "wipe his machine" and ....... into a frenzy he goes. Cutting him off, I suggest he try Linux. Finally broken, he sighs, "No, I'm not computer-savy enough for Linux."

Yea, I think, leaving the store....that's it in a nutshell.