I can’t really get angry at him for solving a problem

Friday afternoon I called the house and got my then 13 year old son. He turned 14 a few days later.

Dad, the WiFi sucks. I'm trying to download an update to War Thunder and it's taking almost an hour.

He was right, the WiFi adapter on his PC is garbage. The access point is in the same room less than 10 feet away. There's no reason for wireless to suck.

I told him that I'll get an Ethernet cable and hardwire him into the FIOS router. That will give him all the bandwidth he could ever use. I didn't think much about it after that till I got home.

He really wanted that update to War Thunder.

He gave it some thought and enabled tethering on his iPhone. Via WiFi he connected his PC to the iPhone and began to download the update. In less than 2 hours he ate almost 3 GB out of my monthly 10 GB allotment.

This did not make Lily and I very happy. She got a text message saying we'd crossed 75% of usage. She asked him and he suddenly remembered what he'd done and quietly disabled tethering without 'fessing up. Lily pulled up a pie chart of the usage and his phone was right behind mine.

I got home and it took me 0.0035 seconds to figure out what he did. I was angry and let him know that he was being selfish. He should have told his mother what he'd done. And yet… I like how he figured out another way to connect to the Internet. He had a problem and quickly came up with an alternative to fix it.

He lost cellular data for the week and may lose it for the rest of December. I also deleted his games and YouTube app from his phone; enough already. But I'm glad he thinks to solve problems and I can't be mad at him for that. Later on I told him I like that part of what he did.

If he does it again though, that phone is mine. 😉