The One Where I Didn’t See That Coming

“Dad! Dad! You are running into the same corner. Turn around!” my son frustratingly shouts.

It’s two thousand and something and my thirteen-year-old son can’t understand why I suck so badly at Halo. This was definitely not the PacMan I dominated fifteen years before.

He was one of those kids that didn’t read the operator manual he grabbed the controller and started running like a wild banshee through the gaming world.

I on the other hand would need to leave the manual open so I could see what button on the controller does what. Don’t get me going on the combination of keystrokes to jump or run fast across the landscape.

In Halo when you get killed you regenerate and show up somewhere else in the game. When I would regenerate my son was there to shoot me in the back so I never got more than a few steps before I was dead again.

In gaming, they rate a player on Actions Per Minute. I’m told the players that are performing at 600 APM are the champs. I was the chump.

In life, I find there are many equivalents to APM. How efficient am I at writing a story, how effective am I in getting a rehab project completed, and how good am I at finding competent contractors?

My Dad always told me, “You’ll enjoy any kind of work as long as you make a game of it.” He was right.

It’s not a game of beating others it is a game of beating your own records. Ready Player One.