http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4156333.stm
You're wedded to a computer screen for much of the day, you e-mail and browse the web without a second thought and texting, well, it's just part of everyday life.
To your peers, you're no more technologically savvy than the next person, but to your parents you are Bill Gates, Albert Einstein and Mr Clippy rolled into one.
Of those who returned to the family roost for Christmas, many will have found the normal festive activities peppered with a rather less traditional commitment: fixing mum or dad's computer.
Forget those illusions you may still harbour about being mummy or daddy's little poppet. For those whose parents have opted into the 21st Century by investing in a computer, likely as not, you have become IT Support.
Gina Trapani, a freelance web developer from New York, is just one of this burgeoning army of familial tech support volunteers. She visits her mother-in-law in North Carolina about three times a year and always ends up attending to her creaking four-year-old PC.
"Usually it's only a couple of hours. This past year, however, she upgraded from a dial-up connection to a cable modem, and the machine got infected badly with spyware," says Gina, 29.
Her 56-year-old mother-in-law, Becky Bailey, "usually saves up her questions and problems for when we visit". Gina tries to nip future problems in the bud.
"The trip before last I set up a scanner for her and there's now a text file on her desktop titled 'How to Use the Scanner.txt'."
Occasionally Ms Bailey resorts to phoning Gina, hoping to avoid the hefty costs of premium rate IT helplines.
"Last week she called on her cell phone from a store where she was picking out a digital camera. She didn't trust the salesperson. Other times it's just how to do something in Excel for work, or why clip art won't show up in publisher. Simple questions."
To you perhaps, Gina. Others find their folks have a touchingly misplaced confidence in their children's technical prowess.
Paula, a 32-year-old journalist in London, is regularly called on by her father in Dunfermline for IT counselling.
"I get something every time I speak to my dad or see him," she says. "It's a nightmare if I happen to ring while he's mid-crisis. I rarely have the answer though. It's usually something to do with his email or ISP."
"In many areas he knows more than me because he actually does his research. I recently bought him a huge book on Adobe Photoshop and he is ploughing through every word of it."
Some children are taking the IT support role to heart, using the Remote Assistance application in Windows XP to remotely take charge of their parents' computer.
Of course, it's a scene that has been played out before.
The sprouting of VCRs in family homes 20 years ago - with their labyrinthine mechanisms for setting timed recordings - left millions of parents at the mercy of their offspring when it came to setting the machine.
Yet today, with digital technology permeating virtually every corner of life, things are getting ever more complicated.
VCRs look positively unassuming compared to the bewildering variety of DVD formats on the market today. Anyone care to explain the relative merits of DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-ROM?
So it's a sobering thought that today's generation of young technophiles could one day find themselves outpaced by the sheer speed of technological change, and calling on their own children for assistance.
