A few days ago my boss gave all of us employees free movies she got from the post office. The series is entitled "Delivering Justice," and the films are all about different types of fraud. Mine is "Identity Crisis: A High Noon Bullet." This does not make any sense, but it does make more sense than the one that is subtitled "A Cowboys Bullet" without any possessive apostrophe.

Each DVD came with an informational English/Spanish poster. Here's a picture of mine, along with the DVD cover:

The film is pretty hilarious. Clocking in at a feature-length 11-½ minutes, it tells the story of a well-to-do couple who suddenly can't finance their new home because they have maxed out credit cards…in Maryland. Wait, how could this be? They don't live in Maryland! No, they don't…but there's a computer-savvy sleaze-bag who does. How do we know he's computer savvy? Well, at one point his friend has to ask him to explain something again, "in English." Oh, and there's also the line when the theif just says, "I love computers!"

Now, the culprit may seem clever. He may even manage to convince the technologically impaired watching the film that any young person who has a computer is dangerous. But the culprit is no match for…the postal inspectors. With the help of the culprit's vaguely southern-sounding girlfriend, the postal inspectors stage an elaborate sting, complete with rifles. That's right, rifles. When the postal inspectors are done with this guy, all that's left are his aviator sunglasses, lying on the pavement. Bam!

I imagine these movies being shown at under-funded nursing homes that don't have the money for cable. Before the orderly starts the DVDs, he yells, "All right, listen up everyone! I'm going to show you some movies about how to not get your shit stolen. You remember Grace White, you used to be in 24-A? She got her credit card number stolen by a guy on the phone, and we had to kick her out. So if a guy calls on the phone and says he's your son, don’t listen to him. He's lying. All right? Protect yourselves."

Man. I do not want a fetus in my womb anytime soon, but kids are HILARIOUS. I don't usually catch a lot of the youngings during my morning commute, but today I went in early and had the extreme pleasure of hearing three middle school students brag about their hacking skills—which, as far as I can figure out, meant knowing the passwords to various teacher and administrator computer accounts. They were all some level of clueless, especially one girl who it seemed was just itching to get in on the conversation without really knowing what to say. Here's a sampling:

Girl: Yeah, I used to hack into the mainframe from home.
Boy with "I'm not shaving yet" mustache: I hacked into the administrator account at school. It's the same thing.
Girl: Well, I hacked directly into the mainframe.
Mustache: It's the same thing! Besides, I use hacking for very serious reasons, like to take lates off my record.
Boy with glasses: The admin password at school is just "admin." It's so easy!
Girl: One time, I used "the" as a password.
Glasses: I use "password" as my password. Nobody would ever guess that!
Girl: That's the first thing I try.
Glasses: No, nobody ever thinks of it...
Girl: It's the first thing I try!!!!!!!

While I found it hilarious to hear those geeky kids talk, it also gave me warm fuzzies of nostalgia. I was around their age when my family first got the internet, and I spent my subsequent hours teaching myself HTML and talking about Maxis and LucasArts games with my friend Mike. It was kind of contagious to listen to these kids who were at the same awkward age talk about their computer exploits. They were boastful, of course (what middle schoolers aren't?), but under that there was excitement and curiosity. I always felt like I came of age on the internet, and it seems that's what like these kids were doing too.

Of course, that seems silly to say now—all kids come of age on the internet these days. They get their tiny hands gripped around mice at a younger and younger age. But there's a vast difference between using MySpace and IM and sitting with your friends on the subway idolizing computer skills (sorry, I mean "skillz"). When we were young, everyone watched TV, but not everyone turned into a filmmaker. It’s the same sort of thing.

Ach. I'm much too young to be getting sentimental like this. But as long as I’m being nostalgic, let me just say: Kids on the subway? When I was young, computers didn’t even have mice.