My family has always been late on the technological upswing. Case in point, my mother told me that she and my dad had just ordered cable television. As a kid, our first television was barely color. My brother had broken off the rabbit ears in the back when he was a curious toddler, so we used some screw-on rabbit ears from Radio Shack that barely worked. The television had no remote. Actually, that’s not true – it did have a remote. The remote was called “the kids”. How it would work was my dad would start screaming from the other end of the house for one of us like he had fallen and couldn’t get up. Whichever one of us had been randomly summoned come ripping down the hall, expecting we’d need to call 911. Upon arrival, Dad would sit back into the couch, point at the television and calmly say, “Change the channel.” Sometimes we’d have to adjust the rabbit ears for him, too. One day I mutinied and refused to change the channel ever again. I screamed and yelled and told my dad that from now on he’d have to get it himself. He laughed. I think he was testing to see how long Neall and I would actually do it. I’m surprised we put up for it as long as we did, and it taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t put up with anyone’s crap.

After the mutiny, Dad bought a new television (some cheapo kind that also went on the fritz shortly after — my parents weren’t too technologically savvy), and the barely-color with broken rabbit ears and no remote television was given to Neall and I in the den down the hall by our rooms.

After Atari had been out for a while, my parents finally broke down and got us one when they found it on sale. At that time, the Atari 2600 only came with two video games: Pac Man and Combat. I think we owned those for about a year because my parents couldn’t really justify spending the money to buy us a third game, so we just stayed up all hours of the night playing Pac Man over and over and over and over again.

I was a certified addict. Neall and I would make forts in the small, square den and haul our sleeping bags in there, and we’d play Pac Man until our eyes were in danger of bleeding out of our heads. Neall also liked to play Combat, but I didn’t really care for it other than the tank games.

I haven’t played Pac Man in a long time so my addiction to the game was cured… or so I thought.

The other day I was flipping around my Google front page — you know, the nifty personalized one. On my personalized page I have email, news, weather and a few other things, and I noticed I was able to search around and find other popular things to place on it. Google calls them “Gadgets”. So I was flipping through the list and, lo and behold, I noticed Pac Man. Yes, you can put a miniature sized Pac Man on your Google front page if you want to play, just like the arcade game.

So I did.

I played a game, then another, then another. I’m readdicted. How is it that this stupid little game can still grab me after all these years? I can’t stop myself! The obvious solution would be to remove it from my front page, but I think I might need a support group before that happens.