Punked

My son got punked by one of his classmates today. He was pissed, and I mean pissed. And he's only eight, so I wasn't even sure he knew what pissed was.

Because I think you'll appreciate his upset after hearing this, and because I am amazed at the craftiness of other people's mean children, I've decided to tell you all about it.

It all started with these fluffy cute toys that come with their own online game. This little boy at school has been bragging for about two weeks about how rich he is (in this computer game). When my son told me about this, my initial response was, "it's not nice to brag, and I don't think you should be impressed by someone telling you that." My son's response was, "no mama, in the game he's rich. In the game." He continued to be impressed by this, and the other kiddo continued to discuss all the things he could buy his fluffy animals with his game wealth.

Then get this - the other kid tells my son he wants to SHARE his game wealth with some of his friends - because sharing is a nice thing to do, right? Oy. I remember hearing about this earlier this week now -

Son: "Mama, N wants to give me some of his WK money..."
Me: "Did you brush your teeth?"
Son: "Mama, he can transfer some of his WK money to me, and he said he would."
Me: "Get in there and brush your teeth. And while you're at it, you need to go back and wipe off the seat, young man."

So naturally, the other kids want to do whatever he says, because they want what he's offering. Only he says that to get it, he needs their username and password. My son and one of his classmates gave their passwords to him. And today the classmate came back to school and told my son that this other boy stole all his game money (basically transferred his funds to his own account), and now he was going to get "revenge", but not on N, on someone else whose password he had.

So when my kiddo logged on tonight to change his password, he discovered that his game account had been robbed. How sad is that? I mean, I realize it's just a game & that the only thing actually stolen from him was a password and some money that wasn't real to begin with, but think about this in a universal sense! A five year old orchestrated this! Hubby and I explained to our kids today that this kind of thing happens with people's checking accounts with REAL money all the time and it's stealing.

The kids wanted to know if they should still be friends with these "friends." Usually, my answer is "yes, you should still try to be kind and work things out" when my kids experience some sort of bad experience with others. But hubby and I had to rethink our answer on that one. We had to ask our son, "was that honest? was that kind? was that the kind of thing that you would do to a friend?"

My boys are bright though. One of them said, "well, I guess we know why he's so rich now."