My family is being torn apart by World of Tanks addiction. We used to have a happy, healthy stereotypical upper-middle-class white suburban family going on. Then my brother started playing that game. Then my dad.
My mother is tired of both of them doing it. Obviously, she wants to spend more time with my dad now that us keedz are old enough to take care of ourselves; instead, he spends huge chunks of his free time playing a Belarusian tank game. As for my brother, his grades have been decaying - "slipping" is too mild - since he started playing, because whenever she isn't around to enforce otherwise, he plays WoT instead of studying or doing homework. I take that back, because my dad also is happy to keep him off the game - so that he can play it instead. My mother also works for a military contractor, so she's very paranoid about military security and for some reason seems to believe the Russian government could use the game as a backdoor to hack our computers. Oh, and my father is a lot less religious than my mother; he stays home on Sundays while she drags us displeased boys to church for three hours. What does he do? World of Tanks.
Now, we actually have two computers with WoT on them. Problem is, I am the most frequent user of one of them, so my brother and I have to compete to get it. Usually I get it first (because I'm... I don't want to say "naturally more talented", but I can accomplish the same results on a project with markedly less work), which pisses him off more, so he hangs over my shoulder and harasses me for hours. Eventually he gives up and - guess what? Unable to play with polygon-tanks, he resorts to watching ambiguously Slavic "professionals" do it on his iPod touch.
Because he can do this literally anywhere in the house, it's practically impossible for my mother to enforce her homework code short of confiscating the device, which only works for a short time before he finds it again. Even when he does his homework, which takes him several hours due more to incompetence than actual workload, he goes right back to playing World of Tanks later at night, after my parents have gone to sleep. And he stays awake and does this until midnight or so, and then watches on his iPod while "asleep" for another hour. And my brother and I share a room (because we did when we were leetle keedz and were always too lazy to change that), so I pretend to be asleep for an hour while I'm really kept awake by the blue glow and Slavic mumbling (he doesn't use headphones) from the other side of the room.
Oh, and did I mention that my mom has a tendency to think of my brother and I as a gestalt entity whenever one of us does something wrong? We call it the "you guys" or "the boys" effect based on her typical phrasing of the blame-comment. Anyway, she treats me as if I'm doing the same thing as him (staying up super-late, getting bad grades, and always playing World of Tanks) despite me trying to get to bed earlier, getting two years of straight-A grades, and not even knowing how to play it.
There have been some specific incidents attributable to tank addiction. Not long ago, my father offered to grill burgers for the family. So he put them on the grill and said he would do the rest. Instead, he played several more matches of WoT before remembering them. We awkwardly pseudo-enjoyed our delicious burnt-meat sandwiches. Another time, my brother needed a ride to something and my dad said he would do it, then played more tanks, and my brother somehow blamed my father's lateness on me.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3783367 times)