Journal Entry #12: The Day It All Went Wrong

Date: November 10, 2007
Time: 21:51

Have you ever felt like your life has gone totally wrong, but you’re able to trace back to this one moment that you felt, if you changed it, everything might be better? I feel that way all the time. I feel that way when I go to work in the morning, when I leave work in the evening, when I go to school and when I leave to go home.

For years, I was able to trace back all the problems I believed I had, to this one moment in high school. I was walking down the corridor when my 12th Grade Geometry teacher beckons to me. I go over to see what he wants and he tells me that he’s starting a computer literacy class, and asks if I would like to join. I said, “Sure. Why not?” The one drawback was that the only time he could schedule it was around lunchtime. Should’ve taken that as a warning.

We walk into this little shack near the shop building. As we enter, off to the left, there’s what appears to be a control room like you see in a film or television studio. We walk into this little, gray-colored, windowless room, and I take a good, long look around. By the door are two computer screens with keyboards; behind them at the far wall are 5 more screens and keyboards. If you were to face the far wall, then to your left would be a dot-matrix printer, and a floppy drive. Oh, each computer screen had a cassette deck hooked up to it.

I looked around the room and decided right there and then “This is what I want to do.” So we started the class and I did rather well, I believe, and some months later, I graduated high school. I then went to The Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, or OVR, to get funding for vocational training. The counselor asks me, “What do you want to do?” “I want to work with computers.” I replied. “Good,” she said, “What do you want to do with them?”
I had no idea. And I told her as much. I said “I don’t know.” So she said “Well, think about it for a bit.” So I did. And then she asked me again, “What would you like to do?” “Work with computers.” What do you want to do with them?” “I don’t know.”

And here I am, more than twenty years later, and I still don’t know what it is I want to do. I keep finding out what I don’t want to do, but I can never find out what I want to do. And for all of those twenty-odd years, I’ve been blaming that moment in high school as the start of it all. But within the last six months or so, I realized that it goes back a little further than that. My problems really stem from the day I saw this commercial on television.

Years ago there was this commercial that featured a middle-aged man sitting behind a desk, and in front of the desk is the stereotypical nerd. The man behind the desk is reading off a list of video games and their accompanying high-scores, and every time the man ticks one off the list, the nerd nods his head while wearing a goofy grin. The plot is, the middle-aged man is an interviewer, and the nerd is the interviewee, when the interviewer reaches the end of the list he says "So, Mr. Johnson, you seem to know an awful lot about computer games... But what do you know about computers?"

And then the look of sheer horror washes over the guy's face.

So after seeing that, I thought that it might be a good idea to get some education in the field of computers. So I filed that nugget of an idea away until a moment presented itself that would allow me to utilize that idea, and now we’ve come back to that day in high school. But I think, if I really had to pick a moment when all of my troubles truly started, I think it would have to be this moment in June of 1964, the day I was conceived.

It’s been downhill at breakneck speed ever since.