By this time it was 1994. I applied for the Computer Programmer Analyst program and was accepted. I had some fun here and there. At this time they were teaching students to be ready for the Y2K problem. For those of year born in the mid ’90s and beyond you may want to Google it. Basically anything controlled by a computer was going to start dying … or turning on humanity … or something of that nature as soon as Jan 01, 1999
Yes, you read that right 1999. Why? Because In some cases entering “99” in the date field would signify the end of a record. So if you tired to enter “99” the program would end each time without saving any data.
So they were teaching us COBOL, Access Database and RPG. All dead languages but necessary to repair all of the “spaghetti” code written in the ’60s and ’70s. I liked the logic problems that programming presented. I hated learning languages that were already dead. But I needed to buckle down and get something out of the college experience.
I was loosing focus. I blamed a lot of things. I left my job at the Computer store. I lost my best friend to a Stroke. My long term relationship was starting to come apart…
In reality I just wasn’t happy. School was not for me. It was costing me a lot of money and I still really didn’t have a good idea of where I wanted to go.
Then …
I woke up in the middle of the night … shaking … pretty sure that I yelled myself awake. I’d had a nightmare. I was in the computer lab asleep at the keyboard. The imprint of the keys still present on my cheek. When I woke up I saw my reflection in the monitor screen. My extra thick glasses slightly askew on my face and my thick snow white beard was a stark contrast to the thinning white hair on my head….
I had the classic programmers nightmare. I’d spent my life in a basement writing code. I had no memory of life outside the lab. By early Spring of 1996 I knew I was done with programming. I flunked out of the program that year.
By this time I had more then enough credits to graduate with a General Arts Diploma with a strong 3.89 GPA. Sadly I still had no idea what I wanted to do.
In Fall 96 I went back to school and took another crack at programming. It still didn’t work.
In Fall of 97 I started in the journalism program. I loved writing but I can’t say that I learned anything. I was really just paying money to hang out in the cafeteria at this point.
In Spring of ’98 I decided enough was enough and I had start making money…
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