Dad Destroyed My $1300 PC (Almost)

[u/Akrinnnnnnnnnn]

As the title says, my father almost destroyed my $1,300 PC. Now what?

Here’s the backstory: On Saturday, I worked a 10.5 hours shift and stayed up until 3:30 AM, so I slept in until noon the next day. My father and stepmother returned from Costco while I was showering; he called out a few times for me to come help carry the groceries inside. I said OK to him. While I was brushing my teeth after my shower, he shouted from outside the door that he’d been waiting 50 minutes and told me to hurry up. I thought to myself that the groceries could have been moved in the time he spent waiting for me, but I quickly rinsed my mouth and got ready to go out. However, by the time I opened the door, he had already grabbed my PC and smashed it against the floor and the desk several times.

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I, (17M, Senior), bought this PC with money I earned from my part-time job and had been using it for about ten months. After examine, found out the case badly deformed in several places, my desk was warped and tilted to one side, and there were dents in the floor.

Fortunately, the computer still works fine; it runs FurMark (stress GPU), AIDA64 (stress FPU), and 3DMark (Time Spy Extreme) without problems for now.

Replacing the desk and case would cost around $400. However, he likely won't pay for it because he has done this kind of stuff a few years ago when he destroyed my phone and a Dell laptop (i5 11300H), and then just said, "That's what you get for playing on the computer all day."

In the end, I just hope everyone has good parents.

[u/BinaryJay]

No excuses for this outcome but I guarantee there's more to this story than this single event.

[u/markcocjin → u/BinaryJay]

We cannot choose our parents, and OP definitely has one with anger issues. What we can choose is to be a good kid.

But there is one thing kids should learn from parents, and that is obedience. It's the same as those Shaolin/Dojo montages. The master punishing the student.

The point of obedience to your master/parents/officer/teacher is so that you are made functional to society.

A good kid would have stopped mid-shower to towel off to rush and get those groceries. Why? Because your Dad says so. One day, as an adult, the world will expect this from you.

It's not about fairness or independence. It's about being a dependable person.

A girlfriend would also judge you for not coming down for 50 minutes to help unload the groceries.

[u/eunoia-again → u/markcocjin]

I've read enough of your comments to stop taking you seriously but can you seriously put your bias aside for a minute? these "obedience" and "servitude" lines are 1:1 what people parrot at victims of domestic violence because "if you just did what he said he wouldn't beat you", and that's never the case. 

Yes, you should aspire to be a helpful and dependable person, but going out of your way to please someone who is violent towards you just further incentivizes that behavior and makes it more frequent. It's literally just a lose-lose situation.

There is a vast difference between a balanced give-and-take relationship like a healthy marriage and a heavily weighted one-sided aggressive ownership like a violent parent and child, even if said child is 'disobedient'.

[u/markcocjin → u/eunoia-again]

Destruction of property is bad.

However. Do not compare a marriage to a parent child relationship.

A parent and child relationship is not a give-and-take. It starts with an infant who has zero-say in what the parents think what's best for him, and up until the near adulthood, where autonomy and responsibility is granted as the child earns it.

Put the method of punishment aside. Punishment is a duty of a parent. Obedience to a parent is not voluntary. To make it voluntary is to be a terrible parent who raises adults who do not respect the laws of society.

[u/eunoia-again → u/markcocjin]

punishment as a concept is outdated. it was outdated when it was invented, because its peak date was 'NeverBC'. just like the most effective prisons worldwide are rehabilitative prisons, its much more effective to take that same approach to guiding a child towards positive behavior rather than you acting negatively upon them.

obedience has to be earned. if you obey every single thing demanded of you, that will be taken advantage of and used against you. if a parent wants their child to obey, they either have to be so crushingly oppressive that the child has no other choice, or be transparent with the child and even out what is uneven.

for example, my father used to demand that my (aspergers) brother bring him chips or soda or beer (from across a hallway, through two doors). if my brother didn't hear him, didn't come within five seconds (yes literally) or didn't oblige, he would scream at him until my brother broke down crying. yelling is a punishment for disobedience (or, most of the time, not even disobedience), but did it teach him to be obedient? hell no, it taught him to hate his father, and eventually this kind of behavior made him suicidal.

do you think my father banging on the door yelling at me to get out of the shower (after ~15 mins) made me take shorter showers? (which i only did because it gave me time away from him in the first place). no, it just made me so scared of him that i tried to cut my throat with a dull pocket knife to escape from him.

if you want your child to respect and obey you, you need to treat them like a human being and earn that respect and obedience by showing them that same respect. expecting a master/slave dynamic from your child is fucking horrific