Less Than Three

Last night I was on the computer, surfing the web.  Actually I was reading Kiel’s Blog to see if I could find anything juicy.  Just a side note to all you parents.  If your child has a blog I suggest reading it sometime, you’ll be amazed and shocked by what you read.  You'll learn a lot about your kids and their friends.  Don’t even start with me about invading their privacy.  If they are going to post it on the internet for the whole world to read, then it’s fair game.  Anyhow I digress, I was reading some of the comments his friends posted, and I noticed several entries that looked similar to this:

i <3 this song.

Please note the less than sign and the number three.  Here’s where I made my mistake, I asked my kids a question.  Innocently enough I asked “Hey guys, what does this less than three mean?”   Now up until this point they hardly noticed I was in the room.  But the moment I said this, they pounced on me like a starving man on a sandwich.  “What do you mean, what’s this less than three?” - “I can’t believe you said that!”  - “You’re supposed to be a computer guy and you don’t know what that means?” and something about me being a loser and an embarrassment to the family name.  After several minutes of laughing at their obviously out of touch father, my boys explained to me that “<3” does not mean less than three.  In some sort of strange, twisted use of computer language, I found out that it’s a heart.  I am told that if you look at these symbols and tilt your head to the right you’ll see a heart, a backwards heart, but a heart none the less.  See it now? The heart means love (this part I knew).  So when someone types something like “i <3 this song” – they are saying “I love this song”.  My question is why can’t they just say that in the first place and save me all of this trouble?

So now I’m feeling like a real idiot, a typical out of touch parent.  If you have or have had teenagers you know exactly what I mean.  If your children are not yet teenagers you will once they become a teenager.  But here is the part where I find some consolation.  My wife is in the other room and hears all the ruckus the kids are making rolling on the floor laughing at their dad.  She wants to know what’s so funny.  So we call her over to the computer and point to the screen to ask her if she knows what this means.  My wife says “Gee, it sure looks like greater than three to me”.   Greater than three?  Give me a freakin break!  Granted math has never been my wife’s strong suit but at least I got the symbol right!  Again, my kids shook their heads in disgust and promised themselves never to be like their parents when they got older (yeah right).   Anyhow they had good laugh at Kathy and my expense; I guess that’s our new purpose – to amuse our two teenage boys.

I did learn a valuable lesson; never ask your kids a question.  I forgot that when you're a parent and you want information that you don't need to ask. I should have simply stared them down, pointed to the computer screen, dropped my voice an octave and said in my firm "Dad" voice “Tell me what this means!”  They would have trembled in fear and sheepishly told me what it meant simply to avoid getting beat within an inch of thier miserable lives!  I could have avoided the whole situation.  Oh well, I guess it’s just part of the continuing education process I have to go through as a parent.  Enough for now, I need to find out what’s going on in my kids lives so I need to go read their blogs.

<3 Ron