Sitemap
Frazzled

The Home of Funny Parents

Member-only story

Humor | Satire

Operating Manual for a Teenage Boy

Warning: Unit Extremely Volatile

4 min readDec 12, 2024

--

The image shows a spiral-bound manual titled “Teenage Boy (TB) Manual,” featuring an illustrated boy wearing a hoodie, pants, and sneakers on the cover. Surrounding the manual are protective gear items, including safety goggles and earmuffs, placed on a dark surface.
image from Canva

Introduction

Though you are operating the Teenage Boy (TB), the TB is the user. Your TB’s control panel, located in the prefrontal cortex, will unfortunately not be fully functional for several years.

Safety Information

Warning: unit extremely volatile. The TB runs on an internal combustion system that may be externalized suddenly and without warning, causing the slamming of doors, stomping, flinging of objects, shouting, and swearing.

Your TB’s machinery is complex and delicate and accidental damage could affect its behavior for its entire lifespan. The unit may also become hardwired to hate you for weeks, months, years, or even decades.

Getting Started

When your TB powers on in the morning, it will initially be unresponsive. This is the result of a manufacturer’s error that affects virtually all TBs. Commands will have to be input repeatedly. Its system may remain laggy until plugged into a power source such as a phone or video game console.

The TB is purported to be self-assembling, but this is rarely the reality. It forgets to put things in its backpack, misplaces keys…

--

--

Justin Courter
Justin Courter

Written by Justin Courter

Justin's most recent novel is Cadenza. More about his work can be found at www.justincourter.com.

Responses (1)