Here’s what happened:

My wife recently had to have surgery. It went fine, but unfortunately included an excruciatingly long pre-operative wait of over seven hours. Hey, it happens. The surgery before my wife’s was a particularly difficult one. It involved pulling a patient’s–it might have been Jack Thompson–head out of their own ass.

Anyway…my mother-in-law–who is nearly 87 and lives several states away–was absolutely livid that her daughter had to wait so long. She emailed something along lines of…”I was so frustrated I went to the computer and played a particularly aggressive game of Bejewelled and got my highest score ever.”

A few months ago when I was visiting her, I had to escort her to the local EB, so she could pick up some games to play on her new, scratch-built, dual core PC (no, Grandma isn’t quite that much of gearhead; it was built for her by a friend of her grandson…still…my octoganerian mother-in-law has a better rig than I do!) This led to one of the most surreal scenes I could imagine: there was Grandma, in the middle of EB, trying to decide between Bejeweled and Call of Duty 2.

You know, in retrospect, I might have steered her in the wrong direction.