by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

When our daughter was born the next year, we set up the crib in the computer room and moved the computer to a little room off the kitchen. Despite an occasional wail from the other end of the long apartment, things were fine.

Time sped by and we found ourselves in a home of our own, with a second child, Jonathan. I gave my 4-year-old daughter the Apple and bought an IBM XT for myself.

But things were no longer fine, at least, not for computing. My office was on the first floor and the kids were forever shuffling through my office, tangling the phone coil, blurping food on my keyboard, strewing superballs and jacks in my barefoot path.

One day it occurred to me that Daniele had never turned the Apple on. Reason: it was upstairs, I was downstairs, and she had no clue how to make it work. And this was an intelligent 4-year-old, mind you. Disgusted, I sought ways to get her and her baby brother initiated into computers without having to, you know, stop what I was doing.

First, I figured the Apple II was getting a bit ripe, so I donated it to a church school. I replaced it with a used $150 PC and 8-color monitor, and parked the machine in the next room from my office, so I could keep an eye on the kids through the doorway.

No good. First, there was no decent kids' software for that old machine. My kids took one look at my new 386, with the sophisticated VGA color monitor, and you could see the tremble in their lower lips. How come I got the good computer and they got the crummy one?

I must tell you, I was flabbergasted at that attitude, because I worked for a living, and all they did was goof around, as far as I could see, and when I was a kid, I didn't have any computer at all, and, and ... Now my lower lip was trembling.

My first brainstorm then hit me. Why not connect our two computers in the same room via a peer-to-peer networking cable, so that we would share one another's resources? That way, all the games could be on one PC and all the work could be on the other, and we could switch back and forth, each according to his needs?

This idea was a winner, except that now we were all in the same room again, elbow to elbow. I would not call it intimate because we were doing very different things. I would be doing intricate, brain-challenging adult things like dividing by zero and not one elbow-jab away my son would be playing Reader Rabbit, a very loud animal with a predilection for phonics, or my daughter would be whiling away her youth destroying space invaders, who unaccountably kept queuing up for destruction, given that she'd just annihilated a galactic cluster's worth of their next of kin.

So while I was trying to grasp a sophisticated concept, like "the cotangent of the standard mercurochrome deferential drive accesses the pi value of the triathlon hypothyroid," I had to share mind-space with the infernal calliope music that followed Reader Rabbit everywhere he went, even to the bathrooom.

One day I stood up, powered down, and went for a walk.

Oh, I came back, eventually. But when I did I disconnected the peer-to-peer network. A little circus music goes a long way. A silence settled over the house.

And when we moved again, I created a shared computing space on the third floor. The kids are older now, 13 and 9, and we can have conversations now which come pretty darn close to being rational. They now have as good a PC as I have, with multimedia and everything, and they somehow got very good at getting it to do things. I honestly don't think I can take much credit for their skills. It is possible that they somehow absorbed it from the space aliens.

I sit at my Pentium up there now, biting on a pencil -- I keep a few around for noshing purposes -- trying to finish some business assignment. While just around the corner, Jonathan and his friends Peter and Eric zoom up and down the World Wide Web, scavenging Star Wars images and oohing and ahhing about all the games and demos they can download.

So I'm like, "The technological underpinnings of organizational reengineering are rooted in the post-World War II rejection of the scientific optimization of motion and time. And, uh --"

And they're like, "Wow, you can download Roger Wilco in just three and a half hours for nothin'! This is so cool!"

And so it goes, me half-finishing my thoughts and them shouting out theirs. Part of me wishes they would grow up and stop all this playing. And part of me thinks what a whole lot of fun it must be.

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of Why Change Doesn't Work.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com