As you grow you are asked one question about 1,432,323,341.2 times. How many times did you hear the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" as you grew up? It's an innocent enough question on the surface, but think about it. It's really rather profound. Let's rephrase it a bit, "What do you want to do for the rest of your life that will provide you with the ability to find a mate, support said mate, have and support children, afford the things in life you want, and provide you the ability to have some form of comfortable retirement when you get old enough?". Does that change it a little for you? In essence, that's kind of what it boils down to, at least to a kid it does. The reality isn't necessarily that harsh, people change careers all the time. But that reality isn't really presented to a kid as they grow up. It comes across as a big choice, something that will have a very drastic impact on your life. If you choose wrong, you just might end up totally screwed. As you grow up they start throwing in twists to make it even more dramatic. You have to choose something that gives you all the above AND it needs to be something you actually like doing, or you risk being miserable or at least sucking at whatever it is you chose. And naturally, sucking at that will lead to no success and misfortune so you will be screwed in the end anyway. Yay!
That's how it all seemed to me. In my world I was supposed to have that figured out by the time college rolled around. I can't say who made me feel like that, perhaps it was everyone, but that's how it seemed. The problem was that I didn't know, I had absolutely no idea. I named a different thing every week. A lot of things seemed fun, but then I didn't really know anything about them, about what it really meant to do whatever job it was that I was interested in that week. At one point I wanted to be a psychologist, I even took psychology in college. It took that class to make me realize 2 things. The first was that I didn't, in fact, want to be a psychologist. The second was that psychology seemed like a large pile of horseshit that people used to justify being an insane nut bar. At one point I wanted to be an electrical engineer, then I saw the math involved and ran away. Then I wanted to be a teacher, but realized I wasnt' crazy about kids. So you see, it was always something different, but none of it was real. My rush to "figure" out what I wanted to be was driven by this belief that I should know it already. But I didn't, and that really fucked with my head.
Here's the reality of it if you aren't aware. Most of us enter into college not really knowing what we want to be, but with a general idea about the kinds of things we like or are interested in. Your first couple of years of college actually are set up to give you the chance to explore those things and find out the truth about them and see if it's something you really want to do. For some people, they need to investigate these things before college. Sometimes rushing into college immediately after high school isn't the best path. I know that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but I believe it's true none the less. I took a non-conventional path, but I really don't think that any other way would've lead to me finding "what it is that I'm really meant to do", whatever that means.
So I tried college and it didn't go well because I had no direction and no idea where to start to being the process of "discovering myself" or "figuring out what I want to do with my life". I use quotes for those sayings because they're bullshit that a lot of people use to sound like they have a clue when they really don't. I discovered myself at the age of 13, I "discovered" myself in the bathroom all the time. I even got caught "discovering" myself once and it really wasn't pretty. Here's a hint, if you use toilet paper to "catch" the "evidence", your parents will figure out you aren't "blowing your nose" every day for a month. That's especially true when you don't appear to have a runny nose any other time of the day.
So, now I was lost in a sea of aimless wandering. Being on my own had finally shown me that I needed to do something. I was starting to realize I needed to go back to school, but I didn't have the last piece of the puzzle, what I wanted to do. I was also starting to realize that I needed that piece in order to have any chance of success. After getting booted from Parisians I started hanging out with a buddy that had started working with a guy who built computers out of his garage. By this time they had enough business to move to an actual store and PC Systems was born. Actually, it had existed for a while, you see PC didn't really stand for Personal Computer, it stood for Pressure Cleaning. Greg Ellis had a pressure cleaning business before he got into computers. But the name worked, so why change it.
When I first started "working" there I didn't really get paid. At first I just hung around cause I didn't have a job and ended up going with Sherman (my buddy) on jobs. He started showing me some of the things Greg had shown him so that I could help. They really did need the help. Computers were really starting to take off in the mainstream and business was growing. Eventually, with some pressure from Sherman, Greg decided to hire me. I wasn't paid much, but the job was fun. I discovered I really liked building and fixing computers and that they fascinated me. I discovered a hunger to learn more and more about them, how they worked, what you could get them to do, all of that. So the fact that I worked like a slave for peanuts didn't really matter. The environment was great too. There were three of us and we all pulled together to make things work. We did a little bit of everything. I sold computers, fixed computers, built new computers, went on service calls, bullshitted customers, you name it and we did it. Greg Ellis took a chance on me, he taught me what he knew and I loved every minute of it. In return he got an employee that busted his butt for little to nothing, more for the chance to learn than the paycheck. In some ways it was one of the best times in my life.
I ended up moving back home, a year had past and my parents were paying most of my expenses because I didn't make much. We had a pool house out back that had it's own entrance. It was a completely separate building designed to be a nice changing room for when you went swimming. It was one room, but it had a bathroom stall, a shower and a sink. It was small, but cozy and insulated. So I moved right in. It was my bachelor pad. I had the freedom to come and go as I pleased, and could even smoke in there. In the end it worked out for both me and my parents as it gave me the freedom I was used to, yet was free. My parents were happy I had found something I liked and were willing to let me run with it a bit to see where it led. After all, they both had jobs as programmers at that time so they were hopeful that I might find something with computers that might allow me to support myself.
Greg was tough, but fair. It's not easy having a small business like that as your primary means of income, and Greg was good at what he did. We took care of our customers, realizing that our customer service would set us apart from the competition if we were diligent about it. You have to remember, at this time there was no Dell Computers or Compaq or any others. You would come into our store and if you didn't see a computer that we had already built that fit your needs, we would talk with you, figure out what you really needed, and build a custom computer for you. If you had an old computer, we'd help you transfer files and data over. We'd help you get the software you needed. You also have to remember that the Internet was just a school project at this time. Getting information about various software packages wasn't easy in those days and we spent a lot of time making sure we knew what was out there so that we could provide our customers with the best support possible.
I spent a lot of time at work, but when I wasn't there I started doing somethings other than hanging out in an empty parking lot. Oh, I still did that some, but other things started interesting me. One thing I got into was the BBS scene. For those of you that don't know, a BBS is a Bulletin Board System. If you had a computer with a modem you could dial the number of a BBS and connect to it and had a variety of things you could do. Some BBS's had files you could download, some had message boards you could chat on, some had cheesy text based games you could play, and some had a mixture of all three. It was the precursor to what the Internet would provide later on. There were some big national BBS's but most of the time you connected to local ones run by some guy like me. When I decided to run one I realized I needed a catchy name to lure people in. I also realized sex sells, so I figured if I came up with a name that sort of intimated that I had a sex site of some sort, people might be lured in. I didn't want to go over the top and call it the "Pulsing Vulva" or anything that obvious, I figure that might turn people off. I also figured if the name was "out there" a bit, it might attract the curious and I could get them hooked on my brand of BBS awesomeness. So, The Horny Chicken was born. Yeah, I know.
Running a BBS was fun. I really got into it. It was neat because I could sit there and watch what the person who connected was doing on my site. I could even pop them into "SYSOP Chat" and talk with them if I wanted. Earl was my "CO-SYSOP". We had to come up with handles so I chose Renegade and he was Weegle. And thus the dynasty was born. It was a lot of fun as the number of users started to climb and we got more and more into things. I ran a version of BBS software that I managed to get source code to and began to "dabble" a bit. It was neat because it allowed me to customize my software so that it wasn't like everyone else, and it was one of my first forays into the world of writing software. I even met girls through this thing. Okay, they weren't necessarily attractive girls, but they were technically female.
Here's a good story. I kept getting paged by this one girl to chat whenever she got on. I did it at first because I wanted girls on my site. It wasn't because I wanted to jump their bones, but there weren't a lot of girls out there, and the more girls that visited your site meant the more desperate lonely losers would visit your site. I was looking for user count. She was a sysop groupie, and yes as hard as it is to believe, they did exist. Eventually we decided to go on a date. So the night of the date arrives and its a few hours before I'm supposed to pick her up. I'm messing around my place and keep hearing the page command going off on my site so I eventually stroll over and see that it's her. She tells me that she has to tell me something. She goes on to confess that she wasn't totally honest about her attributes and appearance. She didn't really go into detail at first but I finally dragged it out of her that she was about 40 lbs heavier than she had claimed. I figure it's no big deal, I didn't really have anything else to do anyway, we could at least shoot the shit. And you never know, maybe it wouldn't be that bad. I was wrong. Oh dear lord in heaven was I wrong. First of all, she wasn't totally honest when she said 4o lbs. It was either that or she had absolutely no concept of weight. I knew I was in trouble when I could tell she was coming to the door by the tremors radiating through the ground. What answered the door was a behemoth the likes of which I can't describe (but I'll try). She was about 5'8 and probably weighed 1,800 lbs. She had no discernible neck and had a sheen of sweat. That girl would be hot on Pluto. She didn't breathe as much as she wheezed and she had an odor of bacon and week old cheese. She was a hambeast in EVERY sense of the word. I probably should've run, but I didn't. And thus the "date" began. I squeezed her into my truck and we spent a few hours riding around talking. That's it. I wasn't stopping where anyone could see me with her. Some of my friends did see my truck however and did ask me later why it was listing to the right so dramatically. They said it was like I was hauling around a bunch of lead weights that had all shifted to the right side of the truck.Eventually I made up some excuse and went home. She tried to give me a kiss, but I pushed her out of the truck and sped away at warp speed. When I got home, I deleted her account on my site and placed her on the ban list so she couldn't get in. She tried to get around it by creating a new user account but one of the modifications I had made detected the phone number used to call in and I used that to ban people. It prevented people from just making a new user account and annoying me. It wasn't fool proof, but it kept her away.
The BBS was fun and I even developed a reputation. Somehow I had managed to offend some people. I'm sure that comes as a complete shock. One thing I did was create an "alter ego" that happened to be female. I did for 2 reasons. The first was an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see how many people contacted her even though I would do nothing more than just create her. I wouldn't post as her so that the only way you would even know she existed was if you went and checked my user list. I was shocked at the number of messages sent to her in one day's time. The second was simply to add another "female" to my roster. I ended up even having more fun with her. I started posting as her after a while and I made up this story that she was my ex-girlfriend but an ex that sang my praises. She started talking about how great I was in bed, how gorgeous I was, how smart I was, you name it. It was pretty over the top and Earl was amazed at the people who bought it. And buy it they did, I had lots of messages from other girls asking about me and wanting details, then they would start messaging the real me trying to "get to know me better". When it all came out, some people were kind of pissed. I developed another alter ego named "Dark Evil" who would post on other message boards and insult people right and left. While the connection to me was never proven, a lot of people strongly suspected it was me. And there was the time I went to an actual local gathering of BBS users. At one point we all had to stand up and introduce ourselves. My friend John, aka Grim Reaper, had started a BBS by then and had a reputation as well. He went first and the crowd gasped when he introduced himself. The positively shit themselves when I stood up and said I was the one and only Renegade. It was a mixed reaction, I had fans too. I had somehow become someone that you either loved or hated, there wasn't a lot of middle ground with me. Again, I'm sure that comes as a great big surprise. In some ways I havent' changed a lot. All in all it was a fun time.
I'm telling you all of this because I don't want to come off like some artsy jackoff who made some discovery about himself, changed for the better, and lived happily ever after. Yes, I was figuring some things out and growing up. But at the same time I was still an immature, pompous, ass bag that did stupid things. But I was getting smarter, although that's not always a good thing. I learned how to do more damage.
My BBS fun morphed into getting into the seedier side of things of pirated software. While I didn't really put the stuff on my site, I started getting into that world. That led to the world of hacking and other computer trickery. I'm not going to get into what I may or may not have done with that. I will say that I never did anything really bad, mostly it was about learning. I didn't want to hack into things, but I wanted to know how. Of course to learn how, you have to experiment some, it's a hand's on kind of thing. I think that should say enough about that topic. I played around with some viruses, again learning about how they worked. I was plagued by this desire to know how everything worked and I wanted to learn about it all. It also has it's downsides. Writing your first virus almost always results in you infecting your own computer. Shit happens.
During all of this, I was also learning about the hardware side of things and how computers worked from that perspective. My desire to learn on that side was equally as great. The other advantage of working at PC Systems was that I got all of my computer stuff at cost. And not the "at cost" that some salesman bullshits you with, I mean the real "at cost". It certainly made getting the latest and greatest computer equipment a lot cheaper. It also meant I could build cheap machines at work to experiment with and then just wipe them when I was done.
Sometimes I didn't have a lot of time for things other than work. Certain times of the year were so busy that all I did was work and sleep. But we still had fun. We had a lot of crazy customers, many of which would try to take advantage of us and our liberal customer service policies. But that comes with the territory. Word of mouth worked well for us and we continued to grow. Earl would even come help us during the summer when he was home from school. It was a mad house sometimes, but it was also great. I discovered that my sales skills were considerably better when I actually gave a shit about what I was selling. I could move some computers, boys clothes however, not so much. I'll share a few stories that I remember from those days.
We had one lady who spent all of her time in AOL's chat rooms, it was her life. Her computer went down and she was frantic to get it back up and running, after all she had no friends in real life. Those were her words by the way, not mine. She was so worried about it that she hovered over my shoulder as I worked diagnosing the problem. We don't usually allow that, but she was all worked up so we sort of let it slide. She kept asking questions about every little thing that happened and every diagnostic test I ran. You would have thought I was operating on her kid, heck I guess I kind of was. Eventually I had enough, you just can't get anything done like that. So I reached into the bottom drawer and got out the hammer and set it next to the computer. She had this horrified look on her face. I mean I could read her thoughts, "What on Earth is he going to do with that????". Eventually it was too much to bear and she asked me what the hammer was for, which of course was what I waiting for. You didn't really think I was going to hit her computer with a hammer did you? You didn't? You thought I was going to hit her? Remember the part where I talked about us having good customer service? Try to keep up. Anyway, I calmly turned to her and said "There's nothing a hammer can't fix". She looked at me in absolute horror, then it dawned on her that I wasn't serious. After that she laughed and calmed down.
We had customers come in and accuse us of creating our own processors and selling them as Intel's. I offered to show them our "processor lab", but they didn't think I was funny. They were wrong of course, I am funny.
Some of the best were the people who knew jack shit about computers but would go in and tinker with things to "optimize performance" and make their computers faster. By faster I mean not boot up. That was usually the result. They would always come in and tell us that the computer just stopped working and they had no idea what happened. They never realized how easy it was to tell. I knew what the default settings were, I set the things up all the time. I knew that if a value was 500000 instead of 50 someone had been fucking around. But these guys would almost never admit it, so you just fix it and move on.
Sometimes we'd get on AOL and play around in the chat rooms. I'd go in the lesbian chat room with all the other guys acting like girls and wait for my lead in. It never took long, some one would come in and starting asking for sex talk and wanting to go to a private room for some cyber fun. At that point I'd break out the "Just because I'm a lesbian doesn't mean I'm a whore" line and I'd get a bunch of private messages from other "lesbians" agreeing with me and asking me to cyber with them. I almost never accepted.
I learned a lot of stuff at PC Systems and the more I learned the more I wanted to learn. But eventually I started to realize that I would need to go back to school and get a degree to really do anything with it. As much as I loved working there, and as comfortable as that all had become, I knew that wasn't a career. I wasn't going to start supporting myself on what I was making there and I would have to do something different to change that. But I was also scared. I needed to take some baby steps and test the water. I figured I didn't have a lot of chances left at this point and I needed to make sure I was doing this right.
Sure I had the desire to know more and to learn more, but I still wasn't sure what that really meant. Hey, I've said it before, leaving my comfort zone is very hard for me to do, and I was about to have to do that again. It was almost time for another of those introductions. Maybe it was finally time I grew up and really got on with my life. I was realizing that time was running out on being a snot nosed kid and that fairly soon I would have to make some decisions whether I liked it or not.
I want to take a moment to say how much I appreciated what Greg Ellis did for me. Working at PC Systems is a pivotal point in my life, it literally ended up changing the path I was on in a major way. Greg didn't have to hire me, but he did. He always took the time to teach us things and he taught all of us a lot. He also became a friend as well as a boss and he figured out how to make that work. In many ways we were a family at PC Systems. We took care of each other and genuinely liked each other. I haven't found a bond like that in a job since. Yes I make a lot more money now, but I miss those days sometimes. They were simpler and more "pure". There wasn't competition to be better than each other, we all did what we had to do to make the business a success because it was important to all of us. And there was a bond that formed between us in doing that. I don't know if it was the best job I've ever had, but it was the most fun.
What happened next is a story for another day. It involes another introduction and more lessons in what it means to become an adult. And that means it's a post for another day.
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