One-upping a Genius

My brother would never admit it, but he was living life vicariously through me!

<memory>For some reason I am reminded of the time my little brother tried to lock me out of a game on his Commodore 64 by putting a math question as a "password" that I had to get right or not play the game.

<a-little-background>I sucked at math. Never passed Pre-Algebra even though I took it THREE YEARS and went to summer school every year. Finally, as senior year came around, my guidance counselor just said, "Eh. Let's put you in Shop instead." Anyway, my brother and I both grew up with every computer that came out because Dad was (and still is) a teacher and always believed computers were our future. (THANK YOU DAD!) So we learned everything side by side, code, mods, you name it. But me being the older and wilder one, I outgrew such trivial matters and was more interested in band and boys.</a-little-background>

Well, when that text came scrolling across the screen with a smiley face, asking some BS question about quadrants or some such shit, I knew he had programmed it, so I called up the list in BASIC and changed the question to one I knew the answer to, and then decided to go one up on him and made it some crazy-ass question like, "What color was the outfit Linda Blair wore on her final performance in Roller Boogie?"

He came home from work that night and walked in to my room with a little smirk, asking how I did on the game. To which I assured him I had beaten his high score, "You wanna see?" Of course he did, he was sure it wasn't the same game he had modified, so when we fired it up and he saw the new question, he stopped and stared, then looked at me for the longest time, and for the first time and ONLY time in my memory, even now, my little straight-A angel of a brother looked at me with some respect, and maybe even awe. I might be dreaming that. But it sticks out in my mind as the one time I one-upped my little brother who was always smarter than me!</memory>