Tell your parents that at some point in the next three months, between the hours of 6 A.M. and midnight, they will receive a singing telegram from Paul Simon.
Create a streaming watch list for them that is made up exclusively of documentaries about the Second World War and the events that led up to the Second World War.
Build a V.R. headset equipped with one experience and one experience only: driving to the dump, to dump stuff.
Develop an immersive board game that simulates getting to the airport four hours early for a domestic flight but still complaining about having to remove your belt and shoes.
Point out that your parents don’t need to buy toilet paper, given that they have thirty years’ worth of Reader’s Digest piling up in their bathrooms (not to mention thirty years’ worth of actual toilet paper).
Unsubscribe them from the neighborhood’s curbside-furniture e-mail Listserv.
Hold all of your parents’ rum, tequila, and IcyHot hostage. Don’t unlock the liquor or medicine cabinets until they hand over their car keys.
Develop an immersive card game that simulates going to a restaurant that has license plates on the walls.
Create another watch list, because they’re going to tear through that first one in two days, tops. Up next: Harrison Ford movies, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and three-hundred-and-sixty-degree walking tours of Home Depot and Kroger.
Offer to mow their lawn once a week, but vow that, for each time they leave the house, you will miss a spot.
Every day, have a drone drop a new kind of ghost pepper in through an open window, with a slip of paper containing the pepper’s history and a ghost- and/or pepper-themed joke.
Rig their front door so that if they open it the Keurig craps out.
Rig their back door so that if they open it the La-Z-Boy won’t recline.
Rig their television to play “Hacksaw Ridge” anytime one of them wonders aloud whether Ruby Tuesday is still open.
Convert their guest bedroom (available whenever you want to visit, no questions asked!) into a ball pit of floppy disks, iPhone 4s, and cashmere sweaters from Coldwater Creek. They should be tuckered out in a half hour.
Send them another watch list—this one is just a Webcam pointed at that spot in the woods where your parents take blurry pictures of deer. They will somehow never tire of this.
Develop an immersive tabletop role-playing game that simulates scolding the G.P.S. for not knowing the back roads, in order to ultimately prove that they weren’t “born yesterday.”
Remind them that their garage contains enough frozen DiGiornos, dusty Diet Cokes, and random cans of gasoline to ride this thing out.
If all else fails, take drastic action: promise to answer their FaceTime calls.
