Disk 6 · c. 2000–02 · age 16–18
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I lost the student election, made my own college website in Flash and failed computer science, in that order.
College, 2001. I'd started there the year before, and now I was standing for student president. I'd put up one or two posters, in the sense that you couldn't see a single bit of corridor wall that didn't say VOTE DAVE. The door had them. The window had them, facing out, so from inside it said EVAD ETOV. I still had one left and nowhere to put it.
The only bit of cork left in the college was the noticeboard at the end of the corridor, and when I got there somebody had pinned the results on it. The winner's name was at the top. Mine wasn't. I lost.
The college was wallpapered with my name. So I decided I'd just do my own thing.
Every screen in the computer room showed the same grey page and a photo of the car park. So, on the college website, I asked if I could help with it. They said no... so made my own college website. I spent weeks of lunchtimes in there building it in Flash: an intro with a loading bar stuck at 99%, a Skip intro button, a sound toggle in the corner and some games, including one about catching chips and dodging homework.
Then word got round, one machine at a time, until the whole room was on it. The college was wallpapered again, with my work this time, not my name. Nobody voted for that one, and nobody said yes to it either. They just used it. Around the same time I had a GeoCities page as well, which is gone now apart from what the archives kept.
At the end of the year there was a table of brown envelopes in the corridor, in alphabetical order, so mine was at the end. I failed at the end of that year. Lack of effort rather than capability. I knew exactly where the effort had gone. It was on every screen in that computer room.
