Boy Seymour has been meddling.
He meddles with lots of things: cupboards with food in, bicycles, TV remotes, and more recently – my hairdryer. This is a new development, prompted by fashion, I believe.
Boy carves things up, smashes things down, walks into stuff and leaves debris in his wake.
This morning, after I had made an effort to straighten my living room (fluff cushions, fold throws, pick up socks, find concealed wrappers – you know the score) I left the room for a while and came back to find my darling boy, meddling with paper.
I had removed his iPad (have I mentioned that I hate iPads?) and his phone, and he had settled down to some origami. I should not grumble at this… but I am going to. In doing the origami, he had managed to MUCK UP THE WHOLE ROOM. The coffee table was somehow wonkily atop the skewiff rug, which had been rolled over at the corner and pulled back. There was discarded paper. And there was Boy, merrily making… well, what he was making I couldn’t tell you. But I bit my tongue. After all, origami is quite a good pastime. I guess.
But this meddling was nothing compared to the meddling of the other day, when Big Seymour was lamenting the loss of the wifi signal.I assured him I hadn’t restricted his access to the TV, regardless of how much I loathe the sound of the zombie/viking/Albert Square dross he watches very loudly. I hadn’t touched the magic app that blocks all that stuff. No sir, not this time.
Big Seymour paced about, willing the magic to happen (after all, what is wifi if it is not magic?) and I sat still wondering what I had pressed on my app that might have accidentally had this effect. I could think of nothing, and my tech problem solving skills at that point were spent.
Now, I have unlimited data on my old, cracked, sticky iphone SE. It is probably wasted on me, but it is handy when the wifi is down. I was answering emails and hadn’t even noticed (apart from the pacing and huffing coming from Big Seymour) that anything was amiss.
Yet there were gentle but increasing rumblings of dissent coming from all corners of the Funky Little Bungalow. (Yessss, that’s it! The Funky Little Bungalow works. I like it.) The wifi was definitely playing up.
At some point, and I can’t recall exactly when, but it felt like MUCH LATER, Boy Seymour roused himself from his very important business which was probably more origami, or more meddling, and he smirked. He wandered over to the router and fiddled with it, before announcing proudly that he had changed the wifi password. He did it ages ago apparently, and when asked why, I think the answer was something along the lines of “because I could”. He thought it would be funny to alter the series of numbers and letters that I always managed to just about remember as JKFRD…(John Kennedy Franklin Roosevelt Delano…) to boyismyfavechild11. Or something similar.
Both Big Seymour and I were utterly flabbergasted at:
the cheek
the conceitedness
the assumption
the dedication
and the skill that our son had shown in one small, pointless and utterly infuriating manoeuvre.I would not have a clue how to do this. I didn’t know it was even possible. I have lived with those American presidents’ near initials on my router for years and I am not sure my brain is capable of adapting thus.
But it is too late.The boy has meddled and now, he controls the wifi in our house. He has b@ggered up the phones, the laptop, the iPads, the security cameras and the TV, and now faces the challenge of making sure everything is working again. But something tells me that the feeling of power he has given himself is worth it.
The following evening, I was once again faced with the wrath of Big Seymour when the wifi was down yet again. I sat tight, thinking. Had I pressed my magic app by accident? Had Boy messed things up so much that the silly new password needed to be entered every time we wanted to turn something on? What was Little Seymour Number Two going to do without wifi, given that she is mid-GCSEs? (I must admit, this last problem, I saw as more of a blessing. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned reading and writing style revision? I hate iPads.)
I gave up.
Big Seymour gave up.
Even Boy Seymour was non-plussed. I think he was also a bit worried: this was beyond his skill level.
On our late night meander around the premises with the animals, Big Seymour surveyed the scene of our current project. He admired the rose bushes, listened to the owls and ignored the hillocks of mud we have now got all over the garden. (It looks a bit like Sutton Hoo at present.) He tidied up some stray wires, and as he did so he stopped and looked at the ends of a bunch of recently-cut wires and went very quiet…
Whist up on the scaffolding that day, re-tiling the poor, broken, leaky roof, Big Seymour had come across a plethora of random wires. Defunct wires. Obsolete wires. Pointless 1960s wires… or so he thought.
Yes, you guessed it. Big Seymour had cut the wrong cable. This wifi outage was down to him.
Boy Seymour and I said very little. We didn’t need to.
Big Seymour was the one who broke the wifi.
#boysarenotmyfaveanything
#girlsarejustbetter
0 Comments