Part 1
I’m going to split this article up because otherwise it’s probably so long that nobody would read it in its entirety. I’ll start with a look back at my school days
(all names have been changed)
A lot has happened in the last few days, including a 5 centimetre laceration on the back of my head. Apparently I thought my feet were wood-magnetic and would somehow attract the chair that wasn’t under my feet, so I can just climb off a loft bed without… well.
I was involved in a few conversations, visited two different hackspaces and once again came to the conclusion “I should do something with computer science”.
Since I’m a little angst-ridden GDR child, I have something like permanent existential angst. If I don’t have my planned “rescue amount” in my account in a month, I often think directly of homelessness and debt trap. And that’s not so far-fetched when I look at my first steps towards independence. I never want to experience that again.
My first idea when I think of financial security and a relatively okay job is “something to do with IT”.
So I often say “I should do something with IT, then I’ll have enough money to put aside so I can do what I really want to do.”
This is probably the first sticking point.
In my opinion, I belong to a generation in which IT was not necessarily part of school education. Sometime in the first school, between 7 and 12 years old, I remember donated computers in a room where we could learn things with MS-Dos during a project week. I am learning – I think – to create batch files.
Later in a higher class, yes, there was the “Informatik AG”, Thomas was in this AG and Thomas “liked me”. We had Turbo Pascal there and nobody really picked me up from where I was. The final task was: “Build a figure that is filled in with colour, an object that has different colours and a movement. So paint a picture”.
My picture: An unfilled stick figure with an incredibly huge head, two very big googly eyes and a stick arm that alternately flashed white and red. It was standing in front of a house with a chimney from which a “smoke line” was coming out, flashing grey and white.
Thomas picture: two figures standing on a beach volleyball court (beach) and playing volleyball together, the ball kept flying back and forth over the net and the figures took turns touching the ball. In the background was water which was also moving and colourful dots represented the audience.
I think I realised at that moment that something was going wrong. I was sick a lot at school, I always missed a lot of schoolwork – I could actually think “yay – still managed to do something” but it was more like “shit I can’t keep up”.
When I left school, I briefly started as an “IT clerk” or rather “foreign language secretary”, but I had even fewer foreign languages at school than IT – so after 2 months I switched to IT training. It was all about “Visual Basic”. But at least that was something where I could try it out and see what I had actually just created. However, it was a private school course and in reality far too expensive for my mum to pay for in the long term. So that was my first time dropping out of school. This was followed by others, but I just couldn’t go any further in this direction.
My relationship to computers after dropping out: I was 16 and got a fucked-up PC from someone. I connected a 56 kbps modem on my own. Connected to the phone line, it produced an incredible bill. I was forced out of necessity to get films, music and pictures from the WWW, because where else would I get them? What I’m trying to say is that I was apparently able to help myself out of curiosity and with an inner drive. I found out how to get the things I wanted undetected and very slowly. So in retrospect, I would say the approach was right, but why didn’t it continue with a stellar career as a superhacker?
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