March 24, 2003

• I may be ill.  Gut cramps and nausea could be stress and sleep deprivation, or I may be coming down with something.  I know I’m ill-tempered this morning.  Don’t cross me.

  
  

  I was crashing last night, in my bed here in this big open room that includes the woodstove (which it’s my job to monitor while we all sleep), our kitchen, the “dining area” (where we placed the computer desk next to my worktable that was once a dining table), Greyfox’s TV/VCR, and “couch potato heaven” centered on the big monitor for the PS2.  Doug was on the computer and Greyfox was watching the same old movie he’d watched on broadcast and taped the night before.

  
  

  I’d been up since about four ayem.  Consciousness was fading about 9:00, despite the TV sound’s being loud enough to wake the dead in order for the deaf old fart to hear it, when I heard Greyfox speak to Doug from his armchair at the foot of my bed.  He asked if he could get on the computer, “for a couple of minutes to check something.”  Doug acknowledged the request with a “yeah,” and went on with what he was doing, which is usually participating in three or four chatrooms while he is playing games or working on grafx.

  
  

  Greyfox knows, or should know by now, that to get Doug’s attention and have any hope of something more than the reflexive “yeah” with which the kid shrugs off the voices of distraction, that he needs to move closer, loom over the kid from behind, get inside his aura, touch him or crowd him… all those tactics I learned from the special ed resource teachers and have been trying to teach Greyfox ever since he moved into this household.

  
  

  But the old fart’s parents reared him to believe that youth should obey their elders.  Never mind that even if Doug didn’t have ADD, and weren’t the cocky Leo born in the year of the Rooster that he is, he has a mother who reared him to question authority, talk back and take his own path.   One of the bonds my son and I share is our contempt for arbitrary authority. 

  
  

  Any authority his step-father has around here is either arbitrary or associated with Greyfox’s twin areas of expertise:  English literature and creative incompetence.  A career in state government taught him all the tricks of getting out of work by making a mess of whatever he was assigned to do.  The alpha animal in this pack is the eldest of the three cats.  Among the primates, Greyfox is the one who is dominated by the dog:  the bottom of the pecking order, in other words.

  
  

  I was fading out again, when a heavy, whining sigh from Greyfox woke me.  I detest that sound.  The kid wears headphones at the computer, so he didn’t hear it.  Greyfox was aiming his petulant whimper at me, hoping I’d rouse sufficiently to yell at the kid to share with the old kid.  I growled at Greyfox, instead.  I’d had it with his petulance.

  
  

  He had been trying since morning to figure out what was going on with his account at totse.com.  Before leaving for work, he had tried to log on, but his password wouldn’t work.  While he futzed around here at the keyboard, I amused myself at the PS2 playing Final Fantasy.  He asked me if I knew how to type a letter on that keyboard so that it showed up “like a power.”  I said the word was “superscript”, and, no, I didn’t know how to do that on that keyboard.  I knew better than to try to introduce him to the character map.  Novelty throws him for a loop, and he only had a few minutes before he would leave.

  
  

  He had spent a few minutes at the computer again after he got home, sighing and whimpering and hammering the keyboard, jiggling the mouse… all that stuff he does to express his frustration at the machines that have it in for him.  Totse still would not yield to him.

  
  

  Now, after getting no response from me (I’m playing dead, courting sleep) he gets up from his chair and walks into the kitchen, pacing the floor.  I finally speak up and ask him to turn the TV off if he’s not going to watch it.  I’d have been better off leaving it on. Things got quieter in here, so I could clearly hear the exchange between the kid and old fart.  Doug was wrapping up whatever he had been doing, moving at his own pace, preparing to let Greyfox have the computer for his “couple of minutes.”

  
  

  As soon as Greyfox got on the computer, all hope of sleep abandoned me.  Another of his sounds I have learned to despise is the, “Uhmmm….” with which he asks for help while preserving (he thinks) plausible deniability.  Heaven forfend that he should actually admit he needs help.  And why should he?  Doug and I both would rather help him than listen to his whimpers, sighs and other distress signals.

  
  

  Now the details were revealed.  Not just his password had changed, but some of the “profile” data wasn’t as he’d left it.  For example, his posts now said they were coming from Korea, instead of “27 miles south of Trapper Creek.”  Doug suggested that the site was having database problems.  I said maybe someone had hacked his profile.

  
  

  As it turned out, I got it right.  Once Doug showed Greyfox how to log in, he learned that some of his posts had been edited, too.  The code kiddie who did it had even bragged about it, so there was no mystery at all.  The motivation was no mystery either.  It was karma, pure and simple.

  
  

  Greyfox has been spewing venom and bile on totse for weeks.  He’d sit here at the keyboard snickering and cackling as he responded to naive posts from those young people.  In all his time there, he never found another totsier of his age or older, and few of them even in middle age. 

  
  

  I can understand inadvertently offending people with frankly expressed views.  I do that all the time.  But Greyfox went beyond that to meanness and cruelty, two of his specialties.  He heaped scorn and contempt on the kiddies and one of them got him back.

  
  

  Doug doesn’t blog much—-only when he has something he needs to express.  Here’s how he put it at LiveJournal:

  
  

  
  

  Date: 2003-03-24 03:56
  Subject: Ugh…
  Security: Public

  
  

  My stepfather is a complete idiot when it comes to computers. Well, not complete. He knows the basic terms like “click” and “icon”. But. Get this:

  
  

  He has a little problem where a password sent by a forum has non-standard characters in it. He gets the password mailed to him. All he has to do is copy and paste, right?

  
  

  “How do I do that?”

  
  

  Cue facepalm on my part.

  
  

  I walk him through, doing it and telling him what I’m doing at each step.

  
  

  “Okay, first you select it. Got that?” “Uh-huh.”
  “Now right-click, and select Copy.”
  “Now we go over here, right-click, and select Paste.”

  
  

  “…”

  
  

  “…”

  
  

  “…How did you do that?”

  
  

  At this point I turn slightly to my right and begin beating my forehead against our scanner.

  
  

  (The facepalm was well-justified.  Doug and I have jointly and separately walked Greyfox through copying and pasting at least a half dozen times.)

  
  

  Around that time, I sat up in bed and participated in the conversation.  Around eleven o’clock, two hours into Greyfox’s “couple of minutes”, I got up to get some warm milk in the hope of getting to sleep.  This damned disease I’ve got includes sleep disorders and sometimes if my sleep is delayed or interrupted, I can be wakeful for many hours before I get it back.

  
  

  I was still awake, but trying to sleep, at 2:30 AM.  I did doze off a couple of times.  Then around 5:30, I gave up and got up.  I’m grumpy.  Don’t cross me.

  • 12:53 pm
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