Parenting Teenagers is hard.  And expensive.

Last Friday was a beautiful day.  The sun was out, the temperature was warm, but not hot, and the weekend was essentially here.  So there was no reason to suspect that teenagers would do to my day as the Exxon Valdez did to Alaska.

The cell phone rang.  It was my eldest at college.

“Dad,” he said, “I spilled coffee on my laptop at the library last night.  The keys don’t work anymore.”

We had purchased the computer two years ago at the college store.  We also bought the warranty.  Certainly it covered spills right?  Every coffee shop in America is full of people on laptops; surely coffee gets spilled on them regularly.  All those people can’t be replacing their machines with every spill.

“Call the bookstore, give them your serial number and tell them it’s under warranty,” I said with my best fatherly, ‘everything will be all right’ tone.  Then I hung up and sighed loudly.

Ring.  “It’s going to be 250 dollars,” my young Hokie said.  “Spills aren’t covered.”

I told him to do what he had to do to get it fixed.  “By the way how did you do you do on your final this morning?”

“Not so great – I was up all night worrying about the laptop,” he said of the math class he’d been doing well in all semester.

Great.

Fast forward to Friday night.  Ring.  It’s the phone on my desk at work.  It’s my wife.  “Ben’s been in a fender bender, in a friend’s driveway,” she said.  “Our car is fine, but the other one has a ding in it.”

When I finished grinding my teeth I mustered, “How big a ding?” (Or something to that effect.)

“Not sure.  The boys said there were no marks, but when the other boy (Name withheld) took the car home his father got really mad.”

Guess it was a pretty big ding.

The beautiful Friday had turned to mush. 

A squishy computer keyboard and a bent up BMW – nothing 750.00 shouldn’t take care of.  “It could be worse,” I thought, trying to make myself feel better.

Enter Monday.  Ring.  It’s my Hokie.  “The computer is going to cost $1,200 to fix.  The mother board is fried too,” he said.

“I’ll call you back,” was the best I could do.  It’s hard to talk with the wind knocked out of you.

Ring.  It’s son number two.  He had a copy of the estimate for the ding.  “$4,500,” he said.

I can’t repeat what I said.  I told him to call his mother.

Tuesday dawns.  We drive to Tech to bring our Hokie home for the summer.  His car won’t start.  He’d been jumping it for a week using a friend’s car.  And the friend’s jumper cables.  The friend’s car and jumper cables were already gone. 

New jumper cables were only about $14.00.  The new battery was about $90.00 installed.  So long to a c-note.

I won’t even get into the third son who went to a Van Halen concert Friday night, who I might add, is only a few months from his lerner’s permit.  There’s no more space and re-living the last week is making it hurt all over again.

Don’t call me anytime soon – I may not answer.  It’s getting too expensive.