One hour of computer time a week
(updated July 2026)
I am 15.
My mother limits me to one hour of computer time a week.
No, I am not grounded. That is the rule.
Luckily, my father has a different one and lets me spend entire nights on the Internet.
I learn how to make a Molotov cocktail, watch porn, and above all, build my first websites.
I discover what it means to be self-taught.
Learning by yourself.
Fascinated by this world.
Without limits.
But as soon as the week at my mother’s begins, my projects stop moving forward.
No, I do not want to spend my weekends with a piece of wood in one hand and a string in the other.
I want to go to my father’s.
But I cannot.
One day, while helping a friend, he tells me that his father has about ten old computers he plans to throw away.
Antiques.
So I come up with a plan.
That evening, I am dropped off at my mother’s with all ten computers.
My bedroom turns into a real laboratory: piles of screens, towers, and cables.
My mother is furious.
She makes me throw everything away the next day.
Everything?
You are starting to understand.
Inside one of the pieces of furniture in my room, I keep the most powerful computer.
For a year, I am able to spend my nights on it.
Of course, one day, she discovers the truth.
And I am banned from using a computer for a year.
Well, when I am at my mother’s.
What she had not told me was that the time I could not spend on my websites would be spent doing something else.
I learn to play the piano, draw a comic, and write short stories with my little sister.
She had not explained that to me.
I could not understand.
She was right.
Today, I want to apologize to her for being such a little brat.
For putting her through so much.
For a long time, what I remembered from this story was that rules can be bypassed.
It was probably my first real hacker reflex: observe the limit, look for the opening, find another path.
With time, I understood something else.
A rule that is never explained only feels like a punishment. At fifteen, I could not have guessed that this time away from the computer would also push me toward piano, drawing, and writing.
My mother may have been right.
That does not mean I would have left that computer in the trash.