Aiding and Abetting

Just on the other side of the wall to my left, is a server. A monster of a computer that has like a hundred bazillion megabyte memory. It belongs to my elder son. He has tv shows and other stealthy and possibly edible things stored on it. It hums. In kind of a friendly, minor key sort of way. This is not the first time a server has lived in this house. I remember when the elder son was in high school. There was this constant back and forth struggle between the semi-tech-savvy staff at the school and the extremely creativly scary-smart verrrry tech-savvy students. Said staff was always looking to head off at the microchip any computer related rules that the students might be trying to somehow circumvent. Like, gasp, playing games on the internet or accessing web sites the school felt were inappropriate. Or fun. No fun shall be had on this school's computers! So, many sites were blocked and, sadly, inaccessible from inside the school. Or so they thought. Dwelling in our basement was a server that my son had constructed and programmed. The web address for the server was quite accessible, thank you. And from there, the entire internet was his. I sighed and shook my head. I knew he wasn't accessing porn or exposing the school's computer network to viruses, he really just wanted to play web based games on his lunch break. So he found a creative way around a rule. He didn't get caught and no harm was done. Had his purposes been malevolent or destructive in nature, I certainly would have unplugged him. I was pretty sure that I wasn't contributing to a certain future of crime and degredation for my son. Now, five years later, the wackiest thing he's done is dye his hair green. Fluorescent pink. Or cobalt blue. And as far as I know, he has only used his geek skills for the greater good of mankind. Oh. And for fun.