This is my story. It's a fluke. A mistake. I should be dead.

I was born to an aerospace engineer turned IT engineer dad, and a childhood speech pathologist mother. (You can stop here it explains everything)

I was both great and terrible at school. A perfect archetype of, "If they just applied themselves they would be great."

As a side-job, my father in the early 2000s ran a webhosting firm out of our 1800sqft home. So I grew up with a T1 line. Which is both insane and completely fucked. I had my own website built with Microsoft Frontpage – in elementary school. It was pages of high-resolution pictures of animals I found. Because bandwidth meant nothing to me.

In middle school, was was recruited to redesign the school's website, pulled out of class weekly to use the Vice-Principal's MacBook to use Dreamweaver. I cleanly reimplemented and honed the existing design, and made my own additions. I used Photoshop healing brush to remove concrete gum stains on all the photos to make it look more appealing. This took a very long time. The site is still on Internet Archive.

In high school I was allowed the "elective" class period to simply be the IT Guy's assistant. I helped administer a fleet of the first generation of OSX eMacs, with files hosted on a Windows server.

This was when I first discovered plugging an Ethernet hub into itself would bring the whole network down. (Sorry Adrian)

Part 1

Due to my problems but promise I dropped out of high-school and enrolled into an HS/College program on a local Community College campus. I took some HS classes, some college classes. It was great. But I was a broken dumbass and ruined it by purposely getting 0 (zero) on a standardized test.

This was flagged by the district office staff, and I had to apologize and volunteer time. In retrospect I was being a little shit throwing their generous life raft in the pyre. I deeply regret it. I was a fucking idiot without perspective on what was being thrown my way.

Eliding other stuff, I was kidnapped and enrolled in a residential treatment program. I had it pretty good compared to other kids since I didn't get sent to Wilderness which is where they put mentally disturbed children into the forest and even if you break your own arm you don't get sent to the hospital.

But I completely my GED there (99th percentile gang - wooooo) and got discharged before my 18th birthday. It wasn't all bad I learned how to snowboard. But I was a teen and this felt like forever and I cried every single night for a year. This part could be a whole series.

Part 2