PC Tech Thread

So good.

I have first hand experience of what something like this can do for a young kid in a tough spot...

growing up I was the only person I knew whose mum had to lease their computer from rumbelows (was a pentium 75 in around 1995 and of course twice as expensive as if we could have afforded to buy one by literally any other means) and getting it put possibly one of the biggest strain on our finances at the time even though my mum was in full-time work we still had numerous months where we nearly lost it as we couldn't afford the payments but my mum worked some absolute magic to fix it.

looking back it's probably the one bright spot of that period in my life growing up with an undiagnosed parent with bipolar and depression.

Left to my own devices with that computer I figured out how literally through trial and error to access a local BBS no I found in a computing magazine using the terminal app before we could afford a proper dial up internet account and through the bbs I found newsgroups about stuff like hip hop and the nba that I was obsessed with but asides from one maybe two media sources for each were impossible to truly follow from a council estate 25 miles outside of london plus it gave me my first email address that worked with the outside world.

after we got the internet I had the tools to basically teach myself everything I needed to know about computing to the point that on reaching college the a-level IT class I was most excited to take literally had nothing to teach me about anything IT related and the teacher basically turned me into a teaching assistant helping other kids after i finished everything he'd prepared for the first few terms in a couple of weeks and he had nothing else to give me.

shortly after that I dropped out of college (picked all the wrong courses, hated the social experience, had over 2 hours of travel a day to commute and most importantly needed to start earning some money as our family was skint), I had a brief stint at a freight forwarding company as a lackey to the IT guy but he had woven such a profound amount of bullshit with the owners to make himself indispensable that my very presence put his scam at risk as I was doing tasks he'd spend days pretending to do in a few minutes or fix things he told them were unfixable because he couldnt be bothered to do it (including one of the manifest printers which they relied on literally every working hour of the day). he even reprimanded me for playing one of the games he'd quietly installed on the network on my lunchbreak (that he played when he was meant to be working) so I was fired at the end of my probation period despite knocking every single thing I'd done for them out of the park.

I then found myself at a itec training college where I scored 100% on the entry aptitude test and blew through the materials for the first few nvq/gnvqs in a few weeks and ended up placed as an intern in a small software house making careers/recruitment software where I used all the stuff I picked up with my home computer to learn programming on the fly with little bits of piece work (a few weeks after joining I handcoded a full html website for them in notepad using the sales brochure for the written content and some digital assets I scrounged up off the shared drive as something to do and the owner saw it passing by my desk and without my knowing announced it's launch as our main website at a training weekend we had soon after while I was out of the room. at that point my primary responsibility was updating an access db they'd built to track the office fantasy football with the points from the paper each week but in the 3 years I was there I basically learned how to make my own batch data migration tools from scratch and that has been about 70% of the coding work I've done for various clients in the 23 years since.

beyond that I left to go to another company where I applied in the final hours of them making a decision, had a last-minute interview the next day and at age 19 beat out a short list of graduates with comp science degrees and since then I've still got a running streak of being offered every single programming job I've interviewed for (after being made redundant at carpetright after five years I had 4 job offers in the one day I took off whilst the process was still ongoing, which was chef kiss levels of enjoyment when they asked how I was getting on in one of my exit interviews).

none of this is particularly impressive in the grander scheme and as I get older I see many many missed opportunities or wrong turns in my career I wish I'd done different but literally my entire adult career is owed to my mum getting me that computer, chances are without much else as an option for me I'd have ended up doing carpentry with my dad instead and I'd still be in a council house in essex somewhere.