Last of a dying breed
It was that make-do attitude that I thank for allowing me to be so open-minded and flexible. I was in the small group of school geeks who lived, breathed and slept 8 bit micros back in the 80's. We had no formal guidance, we just sat down and got on with it. If we wanted something to work we had no one to turn to except each other. I often went round my mate Paul's house of an evening and we'd spend ages trying to fathom out why something worked a certain way.
When I run into IT people these days after about 5 mins I know the ones who were school geeks, the ones with the can-do attitude. If it doesn't work as the book says, we just sit down and faff about with it until we fathom it out. We've seen so many different variations on the same theme nothing surprises us anymore, it never takes long to find out something works. To many people these days can't think outside the box, the second it deviates from the manual they're completely lost with no idea. They then get on the phone or support website and talk to similar people who can't think outside the box either and it's no wonder it takes 5 times longer than it should to fix things.
I'm the son of a bike mechanic, born into working class background but my Dad had the foresight to see which way the wind was blowing and practically badgered me to go into IT, saying it would be worth it. In the end, I went into system's admin by way of being a mainframe "tape monkey" after dropping out of college as I found IT in college way too boring with no challenges. I taught myself to code in Java, C, SQL, Perl plus admin on Novell and later Unix and Windows. I'm learning Objective-C and Android dev at the moment, the love of tinkering is something that I've never lost and hope I never do. I still code in BASIC, Dark Basic and BlitzMAX are fun ways to play with modern BASIC variants.
Sadly we're a dying breed, I don't think the can-do, tinkering types will ever haunt the school yard or technology huts again. Every kid learns ICT now, how to use the internet safely and how to use Word and Excel, that's not real IT that's brain-washing and that's tragic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
