You are in a brothel

In 1996 I dropped out of Arts and Philosophy to do Multimedia. I was always the humanities kid in high-school* - English and Debating and Public Speaking and several types of History - but something very strange happened when I touched the computers ... I was good at programming. Not to sound all 'How great am I' or anything, but I have an affinity with the code.

For ages this puzzled me until my repressed childhood memories came flooding back.

This is several of of those memories.

In Grade 8 we did a subject called Computer Awareness. There was a room of Commodore 64s and the class mostly consisted of sitting in the room and being made aware of computers in a vaguely hand-waving 'This is a computer, kids' sort-of way. Our teacher was Mr Booker who taught German as well and I am pretty sure that the teachers had to draw straws or something to see who got the chore of teaching the class.

Cue to earlier memory, which will prove to be important. Back in the day, all I wanted was an Atari, which was the style of the time. My father, academic that he is, decided that an Atari wasn't educational, and so we got a Vic 20 instead - the rational being that the Vic 20 had a keyboard and was therefore not just for games. Unfortunately, the Vic 20 actually had no games, and so on Saturday morning my Dad and I would program games into the computer ... it would take hours and generally involved a large rectangle moving around dodging smaller rectangles. There was no way of saving the game, so the machine would have to stay on all weekend.

The point of this interlude is to demonstrate that from the tender age of 5, I was already familiar with Basic - which is the language that the Vic 20 and later the Commodore 64 use.

Back to Grade 8. Try and keep up, yeah?

Computer Awareness was terribly boring for someone who had been programming for as long as they could remember, so one day in class I started writing a program.

You are in a Brothel.

> Check Wallet
You have $198

> Buy head job

... you get the idea.

I was 13, it wasn't exactly the most sophisticated of games.

Anyway, the kid sitting next to me, Ross Herring, dobbed me in. The teacher came over and as I went to turn the computer off and wipe the evidence, Mr Booker pulled my hand away.

As an aside Ross was called 'Ross Herring-Aid' because he had a hearing aid. And one testicle. And he was rather fat. Ironically he was still much more popular than me because he played football and I programmed computers.

So I had to go see the Deputy Head Master, 'Mad Dog' McDougal. He was called 'Mad Dog' because spit gathered in the corners of his mouth and when he got angry (and he seemed to exist is a state of near-permanent anger) the spit would froth and fly. Mad Dog had The Strap in the top drawer of his desk and when berating you his hand would often stray to the drawer handle as if any moment he was going to grab it out and leap across the desk like some sort of rabidly sadistic samurai and beat you to a bloody pulp.

Did I mention that this was a Private Catholic Boys Bording School?

Two things saved me.

1. They knew that in terms of programming skill what I had done was far outside the scope of anything they had taught, and in fact was beyond the ability of any of the teachers to even understand.
2. When asked by Mad Dog where I had learned about such filth I replied:
   

   The Fitzgerald Enquiry and The 7.30 Report

   And I went on to explain that my Dad was writing a book about the Fitzgerald Enquiry and I was familiar with a variety of terms such as 'Bag Man' and 'Brothel'.
   

I think this situation so bemused Mad Dog that he must have concluded that I was some sort of Idiot Savant or similar, and it certainly explained the lack of football, so after scaring the fuck out of me for ages with threats of expulsion, Mad Dog decided that he would just send a letter home to my parents instead.

They reprise to this tale is that the letter was sent to my Uncle by mistake. This mortified my mother because we had only recently moved to Toowoomba, a country town small enough that people, upon hearing my surname would ask if I was the son of the Doctor or the Lawyer (and I would have to reply the Academic), and in one foul swoop I had besmirched our good name.

My work here was done.

The End.


* I'll be honest, I am pretty sure I transformed myself into this person because of girls ... I spent several years in high-school being rather earnest and wearing black and writing poetry and being generally a rather angsty teenager. Funnily enough, nothing much has changed except my age.