My cat is diabetic. My uncle is also diabetic, type one. This is the first time my uncle is visiting since my cat’s diagnosis.

Uncle: “A diabetic cat. A diabetic freakin’ cat.”

Me: “I know; it must be so silly from your perspective.”

Uncle: *Laughs* “Pardon my language, but it’s dumb as s***. What kind of world is it when a cat gets diabetes?”

Me: “And you wanna know the worst part?”

Uncle: “What?”

Me: “With enough time and insulin, the vet said it could be reversed.”

Uncle: *Glaring at the cat* “Lucky son of a b****.”

My six-year-old niece is with my mom, her grandma.

Niece: “Do you have any lotion in this house?”

Grandma: “Yes, baby, there’s some in the bathroom. Go get some.”

Niece: “Then why don’t you use it on your feet?”

My cousin spent his youth as a nitwit, and real life hit him very hard in early adulthood. For those playing along, please pause reading at any time to double-face-palm (and maybe keep a tally or ring a bell).

Once [Cousin] got an idea in his head, no amount of advice, reality, or brain cells would change his mind. Pain and bleeding were usually required.

[Cousin]’s Idea #1: it would be hilarious for my friend and me to run around shooting each other with a BB gun. 

Cue a very unsurprising need to go to the hospital because he got shot right between the eyes. He popped the pellet out like a pimple and went home bleeding from the face to get his mom to take him to the hospital. The very paper-thin lie told was that the gun just went off on a hair trigger. He was fifteen when this happened and had already spent several years under instruction of proper gun control. So, no, this wasn’t even A Christmas Story situation of being in the single-digit age range and having no safety instruction. He knew proper gun control and safety; he just didn’t think he needed it for a mere BB gun.

[Cousin] had a growth spurt in his early teens that topped him out somewhere around six feet tall by the beginning of high school and got into a lot of fights. 

[Cousin]’s Idea #2: “Fighting and brawling are fun, but I get in trouble if I throw the first punch. I know! Just say it is always the other guy’s fault!”

In the four years from freshman to senior, he got into nine or ten fights, all of which were “started by the other guy.” While I agree that some teens decide to prove their toughness by picking fights with the biggest student on the campus, [Cousin] made no secret that he was down to fight anybody, anywhere. But of course, he never started the fights. To hear him tell it, not one single, solitary, fight in his life was because [Cousin] stirred the pot in any way, shape, or form. 

[Cousin] got in trouble a lot. His mom made excuses for him (she’s a nitwit for a whole other story), and thus, he never learned. He reached adulthood with a nose that no longer worked properly for breathing due to it getting broken enough times. (Pain was not a teacher for this one.)

By the time he reached eighteen, despite “never starting fights”, he was on a hair trigger for physically lashing out. It got to the point where I no longer felt safe around him after he very nearly punched me because I bumped into his backpack. (For context, I’m a 5’3″ woman, and he’s six feet tall and can palm my head easier than a basketball.)

[Cousin]’s Idea #3: “Enlisting will give me an easy ride to get my college paid for since I don’t mind fighting.”

Graduation happened (don’t ask how he managed), and [Cousin] got hyped up on recruitment propaganda to join the military. We tried to get him to understand that going into the Service was going to be insanely difficult and extremely strict. Grandpa (World War II and the Vietnam War, Navy) and my dad (Vietnam War, Navy) both told him stories of the boot camp Hell that they had to endure and how none of his goof-off, class clown, schoolyard tough guy nonsense antics would be tolerated. But [Cousin] didn’t take either of them seriously and enlisted.

He lasted about a month before calling his mom, crying about how hard it was in Boot Camp and how he wanted to come home. But this is where reality smacked him full power; you can’t just quit once you enlist. 

“Well, that’s just too bad. You wanted this, so now you’re going to have to be an adult and stick with it,” was the response he got from everyone he tried calling with his sob story.

Unhappy that he was getting zero sympathy, and with the full maturity of his nineteen years of age, [Cousin] got the brightest idea EVER!

[Cousin]’s Idea $4: “If you don’t like boot camp, just run away!”

The first his mom learned of it was getting a call from [Cousin]’s commanding officer, telling her that he had gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave). Nobody knew where he had gone initially. 

When [Cousin] tried calling his family, he was told that he had to go back and face the consequences of his actions. No one was willing to pick a fight with the US Military on his behalf, and he couldn’t understand why. He’d always gotten his butt hauled out of the fire before! What did being a legal adult have to do with it?! 

He was eventually found and picked up, now deeply in trouble. Deciding on his next smartest plan, he pulled the class clown nonsense and played the fool — talking to his shoe as if it were a phone, and things like that.

In the end, [Cousin] was dishonorably discharged. He was happy to have gotten out, only to discover that this didn’t look good at all to prospective employers. He couldn’t get a decent job, eventually having to go to school to become a mechanic. He was very good with vehicle repair, but his dishonorable discharge still haunted him. With more years under his belt and those years under the cloud of Consequences Of His Own Actions, [Cousin] matured quickly.

After discussing how to clear it from his record, [Cousin] reenlisted. This time he wasn’t an idiot about it and managed to not only get through boot camp but also was on his way to getting the rank of Ranger. This was sadly nipped in the bud due to a car accident while on leave, and he ultimately had to be medically discharged due to a back injury. His dishonorable discharge was wiped from his record, and while he still has nitwit qualities, a lot of them are no longer in play in his life.

My dad is a retired man who doesn’t game much, but when he does, he loves to play Train Simulator, the old Age Of Empires games, and surprisingly, Colin McCrae Rally.

About two months ago, he told me that he had started getting a weird problem. His PC was randomly blue-screening. It was mostly whilst gaming, but not always, and the problem was intermittent; sometimes it didn’t happen for weeks, and sometimes it was multiple times a day.

This already sounded like my sort of nightmare parent tech support issue, but I said I’d help. My only clue was that my dad had said the blue screen mentioned a memory error. This clue ended up being a red herring that led me down the entirely wrong path.

I headed round with some spare RAM I had and replaced his RAM. A few days later, he called to inform me that the crash had happened again.

My dad also wanted a bigger hard drive, so I decided to get him a new SSD. I did a complete reinstall of his system and took his old hard drive out, wondering if that was the issue.

I got my hopes up that this had worked because I didn’t hear anything from him regarding the PC for nearly three weeks. Then, it crashed again, and I was back to the drawing board, frustrated.

Eventually, my dad went on holiday for two weeks, and I asked him to drop his computer off so I could finally solve this issue. I felt that I had to reproduce the error myself because, otherwise, I just wasn’t educated enough to fix this myself. But if I found out what the error was, then Google would be the hero.

So, I took the PC, loaded up Age Of Empires 2, and got to playing. I played that game for about three hours, but there was no crash. Weird.

The next day, I came back and tried some other games on his PC, including his ancient version of Colin McRae Rally — which, let me tell you, is utterly awful to play with a keyboard and mouse. Still no luck.

This was the moment I’d been trying to avoid. I was going to have to actually play Train Simulator to fix this problem. I steeled myself for the awful experience that was to come and began to play this cursed game.

I’ll spare you the details because man was not meant to endure that tediousness, but I’ll say that after a couple of hours, the PC finally crashed!

But it didn’t crash to a blue screen like I was expecting; it just turned off completely. Even more strangely, when I turned it back on, it immediately turned back off once it got into Windows. Immediately, I thought something in this PC must be overheating, but that was crazy because I cleaned the fans, heat sink, and power supply when I installed the new hard drive.

I installed some heat monitoring software, kept it on display on my second monitor, and jumped back into Train Simulator.

It was during some cursed turn in some Highlands Scottish railroads that I noticed the CPU was starting to get dangerously hot — and sure enough, the PC crashed moments later.

But the fan was working and clean, as was the heat sink. I was nervous that the CPU was busted or something because that’d be expensive to fix. But I decided to have a look at the processor physically. I’m not sure why because it’s not like you can eyeball a broken processor and diagnose the problem, but I went ahead anyway.

When I unscrewed the heat sink, I got a strange surprise. There was absolutely zero thermal paste on the CPU. I don’t know if there had been and it had degraded away or something, or the company my dad initially bought this PC from years ago just failed to paste it. In any case, there was absolutely no paste.

I didn’t actually have any paste, so I had to wait a day for some to arrive, but after that, I cleaned the processor, pasted it up, and put the PC back together.

That was when a depressing thought hit me. I was going to have to play Train g**d*** Simulator a final time to see if the problem was fixed. After four hours of Train Simulator, I concluded that I had suffered enough. Either the problem was fixed or I was giving up.

When my dad returned from his holiday, I gave him his PC back and told him to keep playing Train Simulator.

He told me recently that he’s been playing it an awful lot and hasn’t encountered any issues, so I’m nervously putting this down as solved.

There are still some mysteries around this that bug me.

What was the blue screen my dad saw? Was there actually a memory error I accidentally fixed during all this, or did he just get confused?

Why was it crashing a lot more frequently and in many computer games for my dad but only during Train Simulator for me? That one I think is because he plays his PC in a roasting hot attic — at least, that’s the answer that satisfies me.

But most importantly of all, the biggest mystery that still haunts me: why the h*** do people play Train Simulator?

This story sounds like the story that lasted for almost eighty years (until the last person who was there passed on) about me at my uncle’s wedding reception. I was about three at the time, living with my grandparents, and would do anything my grandpa did. His favorite answer when asked if he enjoyed a meal was, “…fit for a dog.”

I was asked if I liked the food at the reception dinner, so I piped up with what I considered the best compliment for it.

Me: “Fit for a dog!”

I can’t tell you how many times in my life that got brought up during the seventy-five years my aunt and uncle were married.

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