The back story: Part II
After high school I enrolled at the University of Kansas and declared myself a pre-journalism major. I jumped in with both feet – I joined the University Daily Kansan creative staff building ads for the newspaper. I also begged my advisors to let me take senior-level journalism classes and got an internship at a local real estate agency.
I helped the real estate agency research and purchase computer equipment to develop their own, in-house ad agency. It was a two man show, with me and a designer I hired designing, writing and producing everything from business cards and letterhead to mailers and ads for the newspaper.
I begin working more and taking fewer hours. School was becoming a drag. The final straw was a senior-level advertising class. I loved Professor Tim Bengtson, but I was in over my head working with a bunch of seniors. I think they always saw me as a little weird, eccentric… one of the last classes, Professor Bengtson wrote on the blackboard three things we would need in order to be successful in the world of advertising. Number three killed my desire to major in advertising: Learn to play golf. Long story short, I hate golf. I think it is the most boring game on this planet, and yes, I played it. My dad would drag my sisters and I out to the golf course at least every other weekend while I was growing up. Ugh. BOR-ing. That was it. I said “I’m out.”
I realized I was wasting a lot of money and time so I started looking for a full-time job. I took my dad’s advice and applied for a job working at a computer store in Kansas City.
During the late ’80’s early ’90’s my dad had gotten into computers. I’m pretty sure he owned every Mac ever sold. Starting with the Mac Portable he bought while he was still working as a lobbyist for the Kansas Petroleum Council. In 1992 my dad quit his job and begin programming full time. He worked out of his basement (we nicknamed it “the cave”) in the dark for hours and hours, hunched over the keyboard hacking away. To his credit, dad was able to develop, market and sell several games between 1992 and 1998. But when the internet became mainstream and Windows 98 hit the market, dad refused to learn new languages and systems and he quickly became obsolete.
My co-workers, Joan and Gary outside Elek-Tek in Overland Park, Kans.
Elek-Tek changed my life forever. It was at Elek-Tek that I met my geek mentor, Gary. Gary would spend hours with me in a back corner of the store patiently explaining how RAM worked. Granted, I was way behind the curb, most boys my age had been hacking away on their Commodore 64s for years before I learned how to use a command prompt. But, I was eager to learn and I asked a lot of questions. Due to the fact that I pretty much refused to sell PC’s and I spent a majority of my time talking to Gary and the techs in the repair shop, I held the store record for low sales several months in a row. Instead of canning me, they decided to “promote” me off the floor and contract me to American Century Investors. I was told I would be installing mice and keyboard, but on my first day, Derric handed me a stack of hard drives and pointed me to some desktop boxes. “These need ghosted,” he said. I spent days installing hard drives and building Windows 95 machines. At American Century, I learned about CICS, terminals, telnet, SSH and a slew of other geeky things. After about nine months on the job I decided I wanted to go back to school and get degree in computer science.
It is here I should come out.
So here it is, I suck at math. I don’t do fractions or long division. I count on my fingers and I get confused by measuring cups. I flunked 000 dummy math. Twice. There, I said it. It’s out.
So majoring in computer science was probably not the wisest decision I ever made. But somehow I managed to talk the comp sci advisors to let me enroll in Calculus I and C++ during SUMMER SCHOOL. I also got a job in the engineering computer lab working with PCs, Macs and Sun workstations. I was so cool, in a totally geeky way.
I barely passed my classes. Thanks to my TA, Darius, I eeked by calc. It was painful, but somehow I had survived. So what if I chain smoked in my dark bedroom until 4 AM, hovering over a terminal window trying to develop a C++ currency calculator.
Skip ahead to 2001. I was living in Seattle. I graduated from the University of Phoenix with a degree in Business/Information Technology. My technical skills had gotten me thru the door and in to some interesting jobs including: Technical Analyst at a start-up, Support Technician for the USPS, Online Producer at an ad agency, trainer at the USPS and Technical Support Analyst for a biotech.
Not bad for someone who sucks at math.
This pic taken in 2007, for old time’s sake.
The back story: Part III Coming Soon…
