Aware but not

I have finally caught onto The Game, the earlier realisation of which could have saved me weeks and weeks of nagging. Then again, just because you know about The Game doesn't mean that you're automatically good at it and I'm up against some real pros who learn, and learn fast, from my mistakes.

The Players: Bryan, Cheryl, and Me
The Aim of the Game: to chalk up the least amount of nagging and the maximum time spent being unproductive.

My mother hates unproductivity i.e. anything that's not chores/studying/improving yourself. She's not a complete tyrant, she understands the need to waste some time online, which is usually about 20 minutes a day.

In this day and age who spends 20 minutes online? That's barely enough time to visit all your daily sites or must-hits much less entertain your adoring public (even if my adoring public seems to consist of three individuals). Then again, it's a good thing she's out a lot.

So the game goes like this. All three of us will sit around being 'productive', which means watching a documentary or revising or playing one of the various musical instruments we begged so hard to learn and later gave up, and the minute her footsteps disappear down the corridor, we make a free-for-all dash to the computer. This pretty much occupies the rest of the day until she gets back.

Five minutes beforehand however, everyone's supposed to leave the PC and do chores so that when she does come back we're all in a state of domestic fervour. This makes her happy and less inclined to nag or scold.

The trick is to somehow know when exactly she's coming back so you can save your own ass in time. Only I'm really crap at this so I always end up as the lazy, lacking in initiative child that gets a right earful. Cheryl's really good at this game, and Bryan knows all the right things to say to get her to stop lecturing him.

So points-wise I'm way behind and I think the three months spent away every term just eats away at what little alertness I have left so I always come home and end up being the scapegoat. It really sucks.