I may have only been 5 years old sitting on a prehistoric computer at school, but to hear your teacher tell your mum that you were a genius was certainly something that will remain buried deep in my mind.
Facemaker was the program I was using. Ok, when you are 5 it’s fun to build funny looking faces on a computer screen. A silly looking old woman with grey hair and a big nose, maybe some thick black glasses and a little moustache! But it just didn’t solve my crave of creation. I wanted more!
Ctrl-Alt-Del got me into the back-end of the program. From there, I casually typed in LIST and before you knew it, the program lines of Facemaker were scrolling down my screen. Thousands upon thousands of lines of computer language at a supersonic pace. I was so impressed at what I had just done.
Before I knew it a class-mate had dobbed me in and the teacher was standing behind me in hysterics. She was furious, so much so that she grabbed me by the arm and took me straight to the Principal’s office. Technology was a pretty scary thing back then. Maybe I had broken it.
She called my mum and told her that I had broken one of the school computers and that if it couldn’t be fixed, mum was going to have to cough up the dollars for a new one. You could imagine mum freaking out driving down to the school. How was she going to afford to buy a new computer if I had really destroyed it?
I wasn’t really worried. I knew what I'd done and the teacher just didn’t understand. A woman six times my age and she had no idea how to find the program list on an Apple green screen. It was pretty funny actually, listening to her preach to the Principal about me breaking a computer. I wouldn’t dare interrupt!
By the time mum had arrived, our school IT guru had stopped the list on the computer from flowing and returned Facemaker back to its normal state. Not only that, he told the Principal and my teacher that I was a clever little kid saying that someone my age shouldn’t have the skills to know how to do this.
Mum stormed into the school office. Just five years earlier she had managed to produce this 8 pound, 2 ounce baby and now I was apparently blowing up computers! Before mum could get a word in, my teacher had assured her that there had been a misunderstanding and everything was ok. She had done a complete back-flip in 15 minutes. It was then that the magic word ‘genius’ was mentioned. Mum was in shock. Just a few minutes before she was worrying about finding money for a computer, and now she was being told that her 5 year old was a genius.
1987 wasn’t a year that contained fantastic technology. The VCR was still the greatest invention and well, computers were like top of the range items. This is what sparked the excitement in my teacher. I knew how to break the barriers of basic program security and from the back-end, was able to re-program the list anyway I wanted to. I suppose the only problem was that I didn’t know how to do write computer programs at that age, so nothing serious was ever going to happen.
The days followed and Mum kept a small secret from me. Little to my knowledge at the time, she had knocked back offers from fancy places such as the “Krongold Centre – Institute for Gifted Children”. Mum didn’t want me to become the subject of doctors and removed from the reality of growing up as a normal kid, no matter how gifted or special these people thought I was at the time. It must have been a hard decision for mum to make, but a decision I’m thankful for. Being a spoilt little rich brat who thought they were better than everyone else is not something I would have been proud of in today’s world. Not the kind of legacy to leave behind.
Be sure to login next Monday night for the 2nd Chapter of "Nothing to Prove - The Autobiography of Lee James Schraner"
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