Constant Vigilance

Newsletter 2026-03-22

Spying on my family is paying off. My surveillance methods are admittedly lazy. A few years ago, all six of us began sharing our locations with each other on Google Maps. It’s easy for Big Brother to take over when everyone willingly opts in. I used the locations mainly to time dinner with when Lola got home from work or to remind me of which kid needs to be picked up from which school. Logistics would have been a lot easier if they were all in the same grade. If we wanted maximum efficiency, we should have had quadruplets. My electronic monitoring was handy locally, but I was thinking too small. This week, Google Maps showed me the locations of my family spread across half the country. My oldest daughter was in New York, Lola was in Ohio, and the rest of us were in Indiana. It was interesting to see that, while I was in the kitchen, Betsy was in the Met looking at priceless works of art. Clearly one of us should have been jealous of the other. She wished she was that close to a fridge full of snacks.

Betsy had been looking forward to her New York trip for months. She went with her choir group to watch musicals and tour the city. That seems slightly more fun than a regular day at school. Nice try, Algebra II. She left after the final bell on Wednesday and was on the bus overnight. That’s the kind of travel arrangement you can only get away with as a teenager. If I tried that at my age, I’d have back pain for two weeks and a kink in my neck for life. They went to one musical on each of their three days in the city while also visiting famous tourist destinations. It was half a week of highs and lows. The Great Gatsby, Michael Jackson, and The Outsiders were thrilling, while the 9/11 Memorial had a somewhat different vibe. Going from a world where everyone solves their problems by singing and dancing to one where a tragedy of that magnitude can happen is quite a tone shift. Betsy might be a victim of emotional whiplash. I assume there’s someone she can sue.

She found Times Square to be even more stressful. There were people everywhere plus aggressive performers that the kids were warned about. It’s important to avoid eye contact lest you get bullied into paying for a picture. At least now the kids know that being a public nuisance is a viable career path. In the worst moment of the trip, someone tried to pickpocket Betsy. When she told me that, my dad instincts went into overdrive, but the danger had long since passed. As per my usual MO, I had been too far away and was far too late to do any good. She had smartly kept her purse under her arm inside her jacket. The would-be thief reached into her jacket pocket and snatched nothing but air. Despite Betsy’s glowing review of the rest of the trip, that one incident doesn’t exactly make me eager to take my family to New York. Also, what kind of underperforming ne’er do well tries to make a living off of pickpocketing? There can’t be much of a profit margin if most victims are anything like me. It takes ten seconds for me to cancel my credit cards, and I carry cash roughly twice a year. Aspiring criminals would do better to scam people the old fashioned way with phishing emails. There’s no limit to the number of Nigerian princes who need your help.

Photo by Victor He on Unsplash

Lola’s trip featured fewer criminal encounters. She drove to Cincinnati for the day for a chemistry convention. It was a short jaunt compared to Betsy’s trip. Lola didn’t have to sleep on a bus, but she did need to wake up extra early to drive two hours and make the 8:30 am start time. Scientists don’t know how to sleep in. She sat in a big room with a bunch of other science people talking about science things. After it ended, she went to Jungle Jim’s, a giant grocery store known for having unusual items and great deals. You know you’re an adult when the highlight of your day is walking down the produce aisle to look at weird fruit. It wasn’t quite as good as seeing a Broadway show, but touching a strange gourd from a country you’ve never heard of is a close second. Lola didn’t actually buy any fruits or vegetables, but she did find some cheap wine. It’s the little things that make life worth living, but only when those things are on sale.

I didn’t have to text either Betsy or Lola to make sure they arrived safely. I was simply able to look at the map on my phone. There was an obvious flaw with my method: It only proved that their phones arrived safely; it didn’t confirm anything about the people. Betsy might have forgotten her phone on the bus when she got out at a rest stop and been left behind. My superpower is thinking up improbable worst-case scenarios that help no one. In Lola’s case, it was harder to imagine how her phone would have gotten there without her. I guess somebody could have carjacked her vehicle with her phone still inside, but then they would have had to have been on the way to the same science convention. Never trust a chemist with a new set of wheels. I recently used the same digital map to verify that Lola made it to her hotel in California. She’s traveled twice in the last few months for various chemistry conventions. There’s now science all over the country. I wish I had noticed sooner. If we had acted quickly, maybe we could have stopped its spread.

Lately, I’ve felt like a dispatcher as I stayed at home base and tracked everyone else’s progress while they went on adventures. Betsy is now old enough that she has close friends who can drive. They’ve been going to restaurants in other suburbs when they’re not otherwise busy with trips to the East Coast. I like that I can verify where she is, regardless of if she’s in the next county or three states away. When I was Betsy’s age, the technology didn’t exist for my parents to track me like that. They were unconcerned. I was way too uncool to get in trouble. There’s a minimum swagger level required to find danger. I’ll get there someday. I look forward to a wild retirement.

Betsy isn’t the only one going places. Mae and Lucy have frequent campouts for BSA Scouts. I have a hard time remembering which of the many area campgrounds they’re heading to. Google Maps can pinpoint them in the middle of the forest every time. It’s good that they can be so easily located. On the most recent campout, a parent had to meet the scoutmaster halfway when a kid accidentally cut herself while carving a stick. She got two stitches in the emergency room. Who would have thought that sending kids into the woods with sharp objects could lead to mortal peril? No wonder the girls like scouting so much.

As the youngest, Waffle currently stays the closest to home. Her first overnight campout won’t be until this summer, and all of her friends are too young to drive. At least I think they are. I haven’t asked if any of her classmates were held back six times. They’re too young for cars, but they’re not too young to meet up. We’re fortunate to live within walking distance of the library. Waffle’s friend who used to live across the street now lives several blocks away. The library is a convenient meeting point in the middle. My other daughters go there, too. Betsy sometimes meets friends to study, and Mae and Lucy make stops there on the rare occasions when they don’t have something else going on after school. I’ll never say no when they ask for permission to go there. I can think of approximately two trillion worse places they could be. I verify they’re actually at the library by their location on my map. Hopefully they never send one sister to the library with all of their phones while the other three run amok. But then they’d be causing chaos without their phones, which would defeat the purpose. Why bother doing mischief if you can’t record it on your phone and post it later? The best criminals share their incriminating evidence.

Mostly, though, I use the tracking feature for far more mundane tasks. The kids can’t always be gallivanting about for fun. They have to go to school, and then stay after school for a million activities, which I suppose are supposed to be fun. Maybe they really can just enjoy themselves all the time. I’m the only one not having a blast. We’re entering that crazy period toward the end of the school year where every activity is going on at once. Schedules change constantly. I get far too many notifications from the school to keep up. I cope by checking the map on my phone when I get back from work to see who’s not at home and needs to be retrieved. Not every location necessitates a pick-up. If Betsy is at track practice, I leave her. She has a friend who drives her home every day. It doubles as gossip time for them. It’s best if I don’t interfere as they sit in front of the house talking inside the still-running vehicle. I wonder if the other girl’s parents have checked their phone maps to find out why those five-minute drop-offs take half an hour.

This electronic surveillance is convenient now, but, at some point, I have to stop. I’m just not sure when. I certainly won’t turn it off while all the kids are still in high school. I imagine I’ll also keep it up when they’re in college. It would be good to know that they make it back to their dorms. I could also see it as being invasive. Having your parents know where you are at all times for your entire life could be a nightmare. Then again, I would freely share that data with my parents. They would be underwhelmed by my routine. The boredom levels could be fatal. All this tracking might be yet another step in extended adolescence. When I was a kid, there was no way to track me. Now, I’m debating how far into adulthood I’ll track my children. Maybe I should make the cutoff line up with some other milestone, like when they fall off my health insurance at twenty-six. Better yet, I can stop tracking them when they start paying their own cell phone bills. That sounds like the right incentive.

So far, the kids haven’t complained about the tracking. They find it useful for me to know where they are until they’re old enough to drive themselves. It also saves me from texting them for location updates. The less they hear from me, the better. The system isn’t perfect. Google Maps struggles in the big park in the middle of town because it’s a gap between two towers. In December, I tried to track Waffle in the Christmas parade so I didn’t have to go out in the cold any sooner than necessary. The inaccurate data cause me to rush out into the elements far too early. It could have been an honest mistake, but it also might have been AI trying to get me to freeze to death. I willingly use surveillance technology because I think it keeps my family safe. Surely all this monitoring will never be used against us by nefarious tech companies. Here’s hoping literally every science fiction book and movie is wrong.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James