The First Year
Fall 1993–Spring 1994
I enrolled in five classes at UWGB that fall: Engineering Graphics, American History, Intro to Philosophy, Macro Economics, and Trigonometry to catch me up on my abysmal math track record. I did well enough in the first three. Macro Economics and Trig — D’s. The engineering path was already showing me it wasn’t my path, but I didn’t know what else to point at yet.
I carpooled with Aaron, my best friend since childhood. He had a full ride through cross country — he was that good, the kind of runner who made it look like the ground was moving beneath him instead of the other way around. He had a Ford Fiesta he’d bought for two thousand dollars cash. I remember going with him to buy it. The seller was aghast that an eighteen-year-old had that much money, but his eyes lit up to make the sale. I just had Dad’s brand-new white hatchback Ford Escort, manual transmission. I say “just” because it wasn’t mine, but I got to use it a lot.
We both worked at the 54-T Mart, our local gas station. It was no treat most days, especially the five AM morning shift, but we’d keep each other company on each other’s shifts and shoot the breeze with customers. Luxemburg race nights were crazy — everyone pouring through, the line out the door, running credit cards through the carbon-copy slider machines. Finding VHS rentals in the back cabinet was always a puzzle. I’d have backed-up safe drops in the thousands sitting in my register. But most of the time it was slow. I could do homework if I was caught up, which I usually wasn’t.
Aaron and I and friends from high school and youth group still hung out after graduation. We were still doing our antics — driving around, goofing off, midnight basketball, water balloon raids. I’d started dating Anne, a friend who was still in high school. We’d all hang out at her parents’ house, or my room in Dad’s house. Playing cards, tabletop board games, computer games, or just talking. That social life was more real to me than anything happening in a lecture hall.
UWGB was interesting, but I treated it like a place to explore rather than a place to study. Billiards caught my eye the first semester. I played too much and it cost me a couple grade points. There was a Star Wars pinball machine in the Student Union — the sights and sounds brought back nostalgia, but it wasn’t the bug that would bite me later at Bosse’s Newsstand. Not sure why. Maybe grief had dulled that particular nerve.
The world wide web was just starting, and I didn’t understand all of it, but professors and staff were beginning to use it. We each got an email address. Nobody really used them for anything. There was telnet and some chat program in the computer lab, and I started hanging out in there a lot. I figured out how to hack into people’s email because their password was just their birthdate, which I could look up. But since no one used their email, it was moot — I wasn’t trying to cause harm, just poking around, seeing the potential of data. The curiosity that would later drive me toward design and development was already there. I just didn’t have anywhere to aim it.
Then I got into MUDDs — Multi-User Dungeon Dimensions. My friend Dave VanAllen showed me how to use them and I was hooked. Text-based worlds, typed commands, other people logged in from God knows where. It was like D&D without the dice, running on a server somewhere, and it consumed me the way Ultima Online would years later. When my friend Eric moved back home — he’d flunked out of MSOE — he already knew about MUDDs and joined in. That was a thing for a semester. Eric became part of our hangout group, the computer mentor I’d look up to for years.
Anne came to UWGB the next year and we got a dorm together. It was fun to experience college life that way — the dining halls, the late nights, the feeling of being away from home even though home was forty minutes up the road.
But it was a restless, drifting, aimless time. I can see that now. Mom had died three months before I started college, and I was carrying that without knowing how to set it down. I wasn’t doing well on the engineering path. I wasn’t studying enough. I was playing billiards and hacking email accounts and staying up late in MUDDs and going to the gas station and hanging out with friends and doing everything except the thing I was supposed to be doing.
So I quit. Dropped out of UWGB, packed up the Escort with everything I owned, took all my factory money, and drove west. I’d be gone for months. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew that whatever I was looking for wasn’t in a Trigonometry textbook.