My 14-year-old son spent the first part of the year shoveling snow, then cleaning gutters, then cutting grass, doing everything and anything he could do to save up a big wad of cash he could blow on something extravagant.

As a parent, I probably should have ordered him to save his hard-earned cash, so that one day, if he'd squirreled away all that dough in the bank, he'd be glad he hadn't thrown his money away like a drunken sailor. By saving every penny, I told him, one day he might end up another Bill Gates, rich beyond his dreams. If not, he could end up like dear old dad.

Being 14, he opted for instant gratification rather than prudent savings. I didn't argue, but occasionally, and only when it was an emergency, I'd borrow 20 bucks or so from his cash stash.

He decided to blow his savings, in the end, on an Xbox 360. For those (few) people who don't know what that is, Xbox 360 is a video game console that allows teenagers (and a fair number of pathetic and apathetic adults) to play video games against each other, live, over the Internet.

All across the world, teenagers (and a fair number of adults) are now plugged into cyberspace, sitting slack-jawed on their couches, chasing each other around virtual garbage dumps and pretending to shoot at each other with pretend high-powered weaponry. They never see another live, real human but that's the whole point.

It's the master stroke in Bill Gates' diabolical plan to control every aspect of our lives. Bill wasn't satisfied with controlling ordinary, miserable working drones through their computers. If he could get our younguns trained early, they wouldn't cry out too much when led to serve their life sentences in cubicles as adults.

My wife was concerned, of course, that once he had this electronic version of a hypnotically swinging watch we'd never see or hear from him again. His social life, grades and even his physical health might suffer.

I explained to her the one advantage of Xbox 360: The controllers are cordless, so I could, any time I wanted, hide them somewhere he'd never look, like on the shelf where we store all those books we bought for him.

Trying to be a good parent, I also strongly warned my son to be careful about who he was playing against on the Internet. What might seem to be a harmless 14-year-old boy, I warned him, could possibly be a creepy, balding 50-year-old man with a comb-over, a pot belly and, most likely, no pants.

The other day, my wife and I came home to hear all kinds of noise from the basement, and assumed that my son had a group of friends over to play video games.

We shrugged and thought maybe we'd been too hasty. Maybe, just maybe, this new electronic addition to the household would get the kids together rather than further apart.

We even thought of making some snacks for the boys. I trotted down the steps to find out what they wanted to eat.

I found my son sitting on the futon in the basement all by himself.

"Where is everybody?" I asked.

My son reached up to his headset and pressed a button to mute the game.

"What do you mean? I'm playing with my friends online!"

He named three of the guys in his grade, none of whom I had actually seen in months.

"And where," I asked, "are they?"

"At their houses," he said, clearly annoyed at my ignorance.

"Couldn't they just walk over here to play?" I asked. My son looked at me for a long, long moment.

"Why?" he finally asked. "Why would they do that?"

I nodded, and then just walked up the steps to leave him, slack-jawed and drooling just a little, on the couch staring at a video display.

Somewhere, Bill Gates is cackling and tapping his fingertips together frantically, the way evil geniuses always do when their plans come together.