So I have a bunch of home automation projects I've been tinkering with weather related. One of which is an air quality sensor that determines when the air quality is bad with the intention of displaying some visual notifications around the house. I've been working on the coding for it and currently have it sitting on my desk in my home office. My most recent addition to it was having it graphing the data out to a webpage on my home network so I could see the change over time. The day I finished it and started testing was the day before Thanksgiving, my niece, 14 years old, decided she wanted to spend the night to hang out with her cousin, my son, since her mom and dad were coming over for Thanksgiving the next day anyways.
My home office is also our guest room, so the bed she sleeps in is in there. She went to bed about 10, I went downstairs to play some video games and have a couple of beers. I finally went to bed about 1 am, when I walked passed her room, I could hear her talking on the phone.
Next morning comes and after everyone is up and moving I decided to check on my air quality sensor and see how the data looked on the graph. As soon as I pulled up, something was really suspicious. It was basically a flat line with values between 1 and 5 most of the time, but at 1:05 am and 1:15 am it spiked twice to ~150. I took me a few seconds to put 1 and 1 together... "the only time I've ever seen it get that high was when food was cooking and there was smoke coming off the stove"..... ohhhhhhhhhh.
I called her into the room and showed her the paper and told her, "The only reason these numbers would show like this is there was some kind of smoke in the room". She said, "I don't smoke". I said, "Or something like a vape pen." Her face went white, "Are you going to tell my mom?" "No, but you need to give me the vape pen". So now I have a vape pen.
Stop being her friend and be an adult. Give the vape pen to her mom and explain the circumstances and let mom decide what, if anything, to do. At 14 she has no business vaping and you might just save her long term lung damage.
Sometimes in life there’s a bigger picture than just the black and white aspect of situations like this. You as an adult have to try to see that bigger picture and make compromises when necessary but also be able to put your foot down for shit when absolutely necessary.
In this situation it’s a small thing now and maybe later it buys goodwill when things get crazy. She’s 14, she’s going to be experimenting with dumb shit going forward. And her knowing that you’re trustworthy and she might come to them asking advice she wouldn’t ask her parents. Wouldn’t you rather he ask her uncle/aunt shit instead of her friends?