Daily Inspiration Quote by Doug Larson

Larson’s joke lands because it treats the most suspicious excuse in domestic history as if it were a legitimate software feature. By framing “the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog” as a “new function” of home computers, he mimics the puffed-up language of tech progress and product brochures, then punctures it with a childish alibi. The punchline isn’t just that kids lie. It’s that every era invents a new machine to launder old evasions, and we’re always eager to believe the machine before we believe the human.

The subtext is a sly critique of how technology gets mythologized as transformative while quietly expanding our capacity for avoidance. Computers, in the popular imagination, promised efficiency, seriousness, and a future where everything would be neater. Larson flips that: the gleaming device becomes a more plausible culprit for lost work than a dog, because “computer problems” sound technical, impersonal, and therefore harder to argue with. A teacher can dismiss a dog story; a “computer ate it” story carries the aura of modern complexity.

Context matters: the rise of the home PC reframed daily life in the late 20th century, including schoolwork moving from paper to disks, printers, and early word processors. With that shift came new failure points, and with them, a fresh genre of excuses. Larson’s line captures the cultural moment when technological optimism met ordinary human laziness and everyone, secretly, enjoyed the loophole.