Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me. Tim Dowling

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СКАЧАТЬ – mine and my wife’s – to see if I could gain any insight into my children’s internet habits. If this sounds like spying, let me say in my defence that I was really bored that day. I went through the whole alphabet.

      Most of the searches were more or less what you would expect: ‘fantasy football’; ‘hamster in a blender’. Some were mildly mysterious. The cryptic phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’ seemed to me to be one child complaining to another – typing it out softly, so as not to wake anyone – that a website he’d been woken up to view was proving insufficiently diverting.

      Then I got to ‘m’ and up popped ‘my Dad is an island’. For a long moment I forgot to breathe in. I am familiar with virtually every sentence on the internet that features both my name and the word twat, but nothing I’ve seen chilled me as much as ‘my Dad is an island’. What did it mean?

      I tried to imagine one of my sons sneaking up to the computer in the middle of the night to tap ‘my Dad is an island’ into Google. Why would a child do that? It makes no sense, I thought. And then I thought: it makes no sense to you, because you are an island.

      Google was no help. I got no meaningful results for ‘my Dad is an island’. The sentence did not exist anywhere on the World Wide Web. I couldn’t stop thinking of my youngest son, the most likely suspect, trying to phrase his tearful query without using the word ‘aloof’, which he doesn’t know, or ‘unreachable’, which he can’t spell. ‘My Dad,’ he writes, alone in the dark, ‘is an island.’ There are zero results.

      When he gets home from school the next day, I ask him to come with me. His oldest brother, intrigued by my artificially breezy tone, follows us. On the way upstairs I explain about saved form data, and by way of a warm-up I type a ‘b’ in the box. Up pops the phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’.

      ‘What does this mean?’ I ask.

      He looks a bit sheepish. ‘You know they have those shirts that say, “You got me out of bed for this?” I just really wanted one.’

      ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, what about this?’ I press ‘m’.

      He peers at the sentence ‘my Dad is an island’ and starts laughing. ‘What the hell!’ he says. ‘I didn’t write that.’

      ‘That was me,’ says his brother. ‘I was looking for a book of poems we read in primary school. For Mum to put it in her bookshop.’

      ‘But you get zero results,’ I say.

      ‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s actually called Daddy Island.’

      Over time my children and the various machines in my life came to control and manipulate me in much the same way. The children realize I do not fully understand the machines. The machines seem to know that I do not fully understand the children. The children and the machines take it in turns to misbehave wilfully at critical times. Occasionally, when I send a child’s phone thirteen unanswered ‘where r u??’ texts, only to receive the cryptic reply ‘wots good cuz’ four hours later, I feel they are acting in concert.

      I am spending a long, lazy afternoon trying to print something for my wife. The printer, which has not worked properly for some time, refuses to spit out anything legible. I clean the printhead, put in new ink cartridges, clean the printhead again, deep clean the printhead, and manually realign the printhead, printing a new copy between each step, but they all come out the same: ridged, smudged, squashed.

      Frustrated, I give up and go downstairs, where I am ineluctably drawn to the television. There isn’t anything on. My wife walks into the room and sits down.

      ‘Busy day?’ she says.

      ‘I just wanted to check the tennis,’ I say. ‘But there isn’t any tennis yet.’

      ‘Did you print out the thing I sent you?’ she says.

      ‘No,’ I say. ‘I tried, but I couldn’t.’

      We watch the Queen arriving at Wimbledon for the first time since 1977. My wife is weirdly excited by this, while I am unaccountably pissed off on Wimbledon’s behalf.

      ‘I love the Queen,’ my wife says.

      ‘I’d be like, oh, thanks for turning up,’ I say. ‘How did we manage without you for the last thirty-odd years.’

      ‘Leave her alone,’ my wife says. The screen freezes, with the Queen wearing a fixed grin that cannot hide her contempt for tennis. I push the remote and the screen goes blue. Nothing I own works.

      ‘Arghh!’ says my wife. ‘Fix it!’

      ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘We need a child.’

      That afternoon I go to pick up the oldest one, wondering how many questions I should ask about his school trip before I raise the subject of the blank blue screen. As I drive, my phone pings and buzzes continually in my pocket, ten, fifteen, twenty times. Finally I pull over. It transpires that the phone is logged into the middle one’s Facebook account and that I am receiving a stream of comments about a photo from the whole of Year 7. All the machines in my life are working against me, I think, or in the service of others. This eventuality was probably predicted by somebody. I should have read more science fiction.

      The next day is bright and sunny, the hottest of the year so far.

      ‘What are we going to do today?’ my wife asks.

      ‘I’m going to buy a new printer.’

      ‘I wish you’d buy me a printer,’ she says.

      ‘I’m going to get a printer for both of us,’ I say. ‘A wireless printer that will print everything from everywhere.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘I think so.’

      The printer I end up buying is black and twice the size of the old one. It looks like Darth Vader’s head. I carry it up to my office, where I spend a sweltering half-hour crawling around under my desk with wires. The configuration process is meant to be straightforward, but it’s not, and I have to back up and start again a few times. Then I go downstairs and repeat the process on my wife’s computer, which is a different make and requires a different installation procedure.

      Finally, with the afternoon gone, I find a picture of the dog on my wife’s computer and press Print. Nothing seems to happen, but when I go up to my office a picture of the dog is waiting in the printer tray, richly coloured and exquisitely detailed. It’s a miracle.

      ‘Look,’ I say, showing it to the oldest one.

      ‘Did you just print that?’ he says.

      ‘I printed it,’ I say, ‘from downstairs.’

      ‘Whoa,’ he says.

      The next day, I’m at my desk looking up the word ‘ineluctably’ to make sure I don’t really mean ‘inexorably’, when the printer beeps and grinds into life. Oh my God, I think. What have I done? I didn’t even touch anything! I watch as it sucks a sheet of paper into its belly and judders with such force that it rocks the spindly little table I’ve set it on.

      The piece of paper СКАЧАТЬ