Monday Morning Report

How was your weekend? Do your colleagues ask you that on Mondays? A friend of mine works at a place where they never ask her. Another used to have a bunch of colleagues who spent all Monday morning talking over their weekends, one-upping each other with their tales.

I had to work yesterday at a day-long photo shoot, so I took off Friday in exchange, which was perfect since it was the younger kid's 14th birthday. How do I know he's 14? He is now, officially, one inch taller than I. We measured. He got 23 text messages between 11 pm and 1 am; I checked the AT&T phone bill. He quotes lines from The Office at the dinner table. (When I mentioned to both kids that it's amazing how much their generation loves The Office, even when they hadn't worked in a real-live office themselves yet, my son said, "Are there really people like those characters?")

He wanted a "light early breakfast at 8 a.m.," presents, and then all day to play with his presents. He's very exacting about his birthdays. When he was younger he never declared his new birthday age--such as, "Now I'm seven!"--until we had had cake and candles and the birthday song. If someone came over to the house earlier than the cake celebration and said to him, "How do you feel being seven, T?" he'd cry out, "I'm NOT seven YET."

So we had his favorite breakfast and then we gave him his presents, which included one of those new deluxe gaming systems, the one he'd been requesting for months. And then the kid expected to play it immediately. Except:

1. We didn't have the ethernet cable so he could play with his friends online.
2. We wanted to take him shopping to buy a game for it.
3. After shopping at Target, we discover the 7-foot ethernet cable is too short.
4. After a second trip to Target and threading the replacement 14-foot ethernet cable down through the back of our computer station, we find the internet won't connect.
5. Sony's Help Desk line doesn't pick up.
6. Best Buy's Geek Squad line doesn't pick up.
7. Comcast's help line DOES pick up.
8. Internet connection works but online game doesn't.
9. Finally, after reading the 9-point type in the 54-page user's manual, we discover that we need to set up an online account. And because by now the kid is so impatient, he doesn't want me to set up my full adult account with a sub-account for him. "Just set it up once," he implored. It was now noon and his precise birthday plan was fading painfully away. So the Sony research folks can now see that a 46-year-old female in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is all set-up to play Call of Duty 4 with the online name of Timbo.