I spent most of junior high as a stinky pariah on account of refusing to subject myself to showering in the school locker room. By the time I hit high school, I was able to game the class registration system such that I stacked a bunch of AP classes and even a handful of off-site college courses and got out of taking PE for two years. This meant I had to take the sophomore and junior PE classes during my senior year, though. At least by that point most of the other kids were too afraid to mess with me. I think that doing sophomore PE as a senior was the only time in my life when I’ve ever been like 3 or 4 inches taller than most of the people around me.
The funniest part of all of that was that a bunch of the sophomores had been speculating as to why this sasquatch was in the class with them, assuming that I had flunked out twice and had to re-take it in order to graduate. It blew their minds when I explained that I’d exhausted the school district’s available coursework for computer programming, so they were paying for me to attend night classes at a local university.
Meanwhile, me in 19XX: I LOVE PROGRAMMING! C++ IS SO AWESOME! CLASS AND INTERFACE HIERARCHICAL TYPE RELATIONSHIPS AND POLYMORPHIC METHODS ARE AMAZING PROBLEM-SOLVING TOOLS AND I CAN’T WAIT TO USE THEM IN THE REAL WORLD!!!
Me in 2024: Please kill me. I never want to see another [VENDOR/PLATFORM NAME REDACTED] project ever again, and this makes me despise the entire tech industry at large because everyone around me who operates in a decision-making capacity – but does no actual development – insists that this is the Best Thing Ever because the Gartner Magick Heptahedron told them so. I envy the dead.
I spent most of junior high as a stinky pariah on account of refusing to subject myself to showering in the school locker room. By the time I hit high school, I was able to game the class registration system such that I stacked a bunch of AP classes and even a handful of off-site college courses and got out of taking PE for two years. This meant I had to take the sophomore and junior PE classes during my senior year, though. At least by that point most of the other kids were too afraid to mess with me. I think that doing sophomore PE as a senior was the only time in my life when I’ve ever been like 3 or 4 inches taller than most of the people around me.
The funniest part of all of that was that a bunch of the sophomores had been speculating as to why this sasquatch was in the class with them, assuming that I had flunked out twice and had to re-take it in order to graduate. It blew their minds when I explained that I’d exhausted the school district’s available coursework for computer programming, so they were paying for me to attend night classes at a local university.
Meanwhile, me in 19XX: I LOVE PROGRAMMING! C++ IS SO AWESOME! CLASS AND INTERFACE HIERARCHICAL TYPE RELATIONSHIPS AND POLYMORPHIC METHODS ARE AMAZING PROBLEM-SOLVING TOOLS AND I CAN’T WAIT TO USE THEM IN THE REAL WORLD!!!
Me in 2024: Please kill me. I never want to see another [VENDOR/PLATFORM NAME REDACTED] project ever again, and this makes me despise the entire tech industry at large because everyone around me who operates in a decision-making capacity – but does no actual development – insists that this is the Best Thing Ever because the Gartner Magick Heptahedron told them so. I envy the dead.