Disk 7 · c. 2002–03 · age 18–19
Walking Out
University taught me one important thing: where the door was.
It was a games development course, round about 2002, and I was eighteen. The lectures were in a big tiered theatre with tip-up seats, and the lecturer taught from acetates on an overhead projector, some of which were older than me. Last week's was JavaScript that sniffed for Netscape 4 and wrote the page out with document.write. Even then, you didn't do either of those anymore.
I already knew most of it, so I didn't listen. I looked at the rain on the windows, at the clock that had said ten past ten since Freshers' Week, at the lad who'd been asleep since the register. By the time the lecture got round to binary I was three levels into a platform game in the margin of my notepad.
So he called me out. David. Everyone turned round, even the lad who'd been asleep, and up went a question on the acetate: what's forty-two in binary? Zero, zero, one, zero, one, zero, one, zero. I had it before he'd got the lid back on his pen.
He looked at the acetate for a long time, like it had let him down, and then he said the thing I've remembered ever since: Well, you should still listen. He had a point. I didn't listen to that either.
Later that year the department called me in for a chat. I was always finished first, they said, and I clearly knew the Java already, so they'd like to put me on a fast track. I didn't need to attend all the Java lessons.
I heard you don't need to attend and not a great deal after that. At the next Java lecture, somewhere between Vector and Hashtable, I stood up, walked down the steps, past the projector, and out of the door with the green sign over it. I left the course that year and went off to build things instead.
