I Am the Big Bad I.T. Boy of This House

I am now at the age where I buy shit I need and then retroactively call it a gift from my family if I happen to be due one. For example, this past Father’s Day, I “got” a router as a present. Truthfully, I had bought the thing a week earlier, but that was close enough to Me Day to belatedly fold it into the celebration. My other gift was a nap. Good gifts.

I am also now at the age where I talk shop about home electronics with other dads. Seeing as how there are no other dads around me at the moment, YOU must bear the brunt of my dadness in this space. I apologize in advance. I bought this new router because I had a Quantum router from Verizon that not only has piss-poor range, but also came with an insidious monthly rental fee snuck into my Fios bill. I wanted my own router. I wanted to save money and I wanted to control my WiFi destiny. I didn’t wanna go to Verizon to upgrade this because all Verizon does when you call them is say, “Oh, so sorry. Your internet is bad because you have our Bad Plan. But we’ll happily update you to our Actually Good Plan for just $85 more a month!” Fuck that company. When my contract with them is up, I’m gonna threaten to flee to a new ISP to bitch about, and then I will be too lazy to actually do it.

Anyway, the router arrived. Three of them, actually. My goal was to bridge two of them and create my own DIY mesh WiFi system (which features hubs scattered around the house to keep the WiFi pumping) without plunking down $300 for Orbi or Eero or Artoo or any other high-priced mesh kit out on the market. I chatted with a neighbor and fellow dad about how to squeeze as much bandwidth out of my current setup as possible, because that’s the kind of shit I talk about now. I followed his advice and bought a super old Verizon router for $20 to connect to the coaxial, turned off the WiFi signal on that router (way harder than it sounds; why is there not just a switch on the fucking thing?), and then connected the shitty old router to one of the nice new ones, which had no coaxial input. I could explain all this in greater detail but you do not want me to do that.

I did all this before cracking open the two-page instruction manual for the nice router and found, to my chagrin, that it had only one instruction: to download an app that would do all the connecting for me. I set up my little router daisy chain after all that nonsense, then I opened up a Speedtest app to check the WiFi and it was, sweet heavens, rampaging through the house. I was flush with delight. Finally, I could watch Rise of Skywalker trailers on the toilet with no lag! BLISS.

This new nice router was a Netgear Nighthawk. They call it the Nighthawk because it sounds like a sports coupe. That way, men in the midst of a mid-life crisis will be drawn to it. And was I ever! I did all my due diligence on home routers (that is to say, I did a Google search) and picked this bad boy because its signal did well going through brick, and my home setup conveniently features a brick wall getting in the way of my office and the rest of the house. You’d think I would’ve had Verizon stick the Fios box in a more central location in the house, but I apparently was too horny for Internet all those years ago to quibble.

I tried to set up the second Nighthawk as a wireless repeater only to discover, once I logged onto its admin page (they’ve made it so that you kinda need WiFi to set up your WiFi) and called Netgear customer support, that the absolute newest model of Nighthawk router, unlike the two previous versions, does NOT have the ability to be used as a range extender for another router.

“I should tell them they should add that capability back,” said the operator.

“Why yes, I believe you should.”

Then I went to the Verizon store to return my Quantum router and was told to go to a different Verizon store, where the clerk was on speakerphone for 15 minutes before curtly telling me to leave my old router on the counter and she would get to it. And so, for Father’s Day, I ended up giving myself slightly better home WiFi, along with an elephantine migraine.

But that’s my lot in life now. I am the IT guy of my house. Tool Time here means Tech Support Time. If you need me to put up drywall, I am useless. I am only handy when it comes to unfucking your phone. All the kids come to me when they need me to sign into Apple to download some awful game from the App Store, or when Netflix goes blurry, or when they don’t know the password to something, or when the Internet is acting up. Oh, do they come to me when the Internet is acting up. You think you get pissy when you have tech issues? You are nothing compared to a child. They all turn into the apoplectic Apple store lady in an instant. And, in response to their endless caterwauling, I turn into Nick Burns. I huff and I puff and I impatiently tell them to turn their shit off and then back on again.

When I solve a problem, like by buying a new router that boosts the home WiFi, I strut like a peacock. HOW GREAT IS THIS, KIDS, HUH? I am programmed for maximum obnoxiousness, like Dustin in those Fios ads. This is as close as I get to building a treehouse with my bare hands, and I get no closer. So yes, I indulge myself when I triumph. This is me being a useful and manly man. Being handy in the 21st century means being able to keep all the home tech running smoothly, and I wager I’m not the only dad in America who has taken on the role of self-appointed Director of IT. I know this because when I need to fix a bug, I can just lurk at one of a million online forums where dads are constantly plying others who are desperate to wire solutions to finicky home tech issues with advice.

Is it alarming that guys like me have dedicated whatever meager can-do energy they have to optimizing screen time for loved ones? It is, although apparently not enough for me to change my methods. The great softening of the American male continues unabated. As with physical home projects, being the IT guy means I can indulge my inner micromanager and exercise full control over a vital aspect of this household. This is my turf. You must go through me if you wanna know the WiFi password, which is 5GTWX6969KQV420FLARF. When trouble strikes, I get to cloister myself over in the corner and make frowny faces and curse and marshal all of my wiles to solve the problem. No one else gets to sort it out but me. [Trump voice] I ALONE CAN FIX! If I can’t get your iPad working again, you be fucked. And I will not rest until it is indeed fixed. There could be a nuclear war going on outside (fingers crossed!) and I would be too entrenched in my work pressing the WPS button on the range extender to notice.

This is a role I quietly cherish. Like doing my own taxes, I dread tech problems in this house but also secretly look forward to them popping up so that I can prove my mettle. And when I do so, I expect to be showered with treasures for it. I’m thinking a REALLY fancy range extender for my troubles this time around. Wouldn’t that be sweet?

Originally Appeared on GQ