cyan's Journal: A Novel Idea

"Sofia Rubenstein, 17, got in trouble the way a lot of teens do these days. [...] Her incessant text-messaging racked up a huge phone bill on the family's wireless plan. [...] Last month the Washington high school junior used 6,807 text messages, which, at a rate of 15 cents apiece for most of them, pushed the family's Verizon Wireless bill to more than $1,100 for the month. [...] Sofia will be working in her parents' retail store this summer to pay off her debt."

This reminds me of a certain situation that occurred right here in Grande Cache somewhere between ten to fifteen years ago. I was just a kid, certainly younger than Sofia's age, but a kid never the less. Instead of being out with some of the other kids doing what they did best: smoking, getting drunk, or hitting the drugs, I was sitting on my computer in the basement racking up long distance charges by calling BBS's all over the United States. Software Creations in Massachusetts was an all-time favourite of mine. Software Creations was actually my first experience with the Internet, by way of USENET. You can still find some of my (admittedly lame) posts on rec.games.video.nintendo talking about (the then just released) Final Fantasy III.

The problem with this is that I would rack up rather large phone bills. Of course, being a kid, I really didn't appreciate how tough it was to come up with an extra $500 to $1,000 out of nowhere for that month. At least in Sofia's case, her parents decided that the best way to teach this virtue was to have her work off her debt. In my case, my father came up with the novel idea of seizing all of my equipment as collateral against my debt. There's no problem with that. I didn't like it very much, being a kid and all, but it makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is what he did next: he sold it all at fire sale prices. That's fine, I guess, if you're going to recover money for the debt and call it even. But selling at fire sale prices doesn't really do much to pay down the debt, now does it? At least give me an accounting-style breakdown or something to introduce me to the wide world of how real life "adult" finance works. You know, educate me about how tough it really is to pay this stuff down, and maybe I'll understand the consequences. But this "scorched earth" policy my father followed was very bizarre. In fact, it just inflamed the situation. Maybe he was simply angry. But, one should never harbour anger towards their children; they should educate, encourage, lead them on the right path, take an interest in their hobbies, that sort of thing.

The worst part about the whole ordeal is that most of it can be forgiven. At the end of the day, I'm typing this on a Pentium 4 3.0ghz machine with 2GB RAM. I own a nice IBM 1.6ghz Centrino laptop with 2GB RAM. My BBS runs next to me on a dual Xeon 2.6ghz server with 3GB RAM and 6 hard disks in 3 RAID-1 arrays. So, really, who gives a shit about having my old 386/16mhz machine taken away from me? I'm doing quite well now, so what does it matter?

It all comes down to the floppy disks. At the time, floppies were the premiere way for any computer user to store their data. Just as a poet has a notebook, an artist a sketchbook, a musician his musical scores, a computer user has his data. In fact, when you look at the amount of money spent on phone bills, most of it was turned into data. All of that money my parents spent wasn't simply on two computer modems shouting tones at one another, it was spent on downloading hard data to my computer, and then storing it onto floppy. Those floppy disks were the cumulation of all of that money spent, plus more.

My father took those floppy disks, and sold them at fire sale prices to Steve Bott. At the time, I considered Steve to be one of my closest friends. Steve then took the disks, erased them all, and began selling them for a 400% profit. Now, this isn't exactly my father's fault. There really was no way for him to realize that one of my closest friends was an asshole. I thought Steve Bott would say something along the lines of "I got these disks from your father, so I'm not going to erase them, but if you somehow find the cash to pay for them, then at least you can get your data back." But, my father did have the effect of turning one of my best friends against me. When you're a young teenager, that's a tough blow to take.

Taking things into my own hands, I stole a 14.4 HST USR modem from my father and sold it for $60. Using that $60, Stephen Joseph and I bought as many of the 'fire sale' disks we could and brought them back for analysis. I sent a proxy in to buy the disks, to whom Steve Bott said coyly, "The data's gone. There's no way you can get it back." Stephen then coded what is basically a dirty version of 'dd' in QuickBasic. It would take the raw disk image and dump it to the hard drive. Then, using PKZIPFIX, it reconstructed entire ZIP files of the disk contents, provided that the data on the disk was zipped to begin with.

I did end up getting a lot of data back, however, a lot of it was also lost. Anything not in a ZIP file, such as the multi-hundred page Final Fantasy III FAQ I was working on, was gone. Anything on any disk bought by a random customer into Steve Bott's computer store was gone. Some of these things can't be replaced. Various notes, custom made programs, BBS data, text files... all gone.

Even now, I'm still looking for certain things that were lost in that incident. There was an ASCII/ANSI-based game similar to ZZT called "Insanity." It was made by a company based out of Scotland, or at least somewhere in the United Kingdom. It was shareware, but also had a full version available. To this day, despite a cumulation of hours scouring the Internet for this game, it's nowhere to be found.

So, what did this all accomplish? What lessons did my father teach to my teenage self? He first made me angry, then resentful. He left me confused and under the impression that my aspirations were worthless. He didn't explain the consequence of my actions, nor did he try to demonstrate them. Then, he engaged in a virtual book burning by committing my disks to the void and destroying years of work. As icing on the cake, he then turned a friend against me.

Of course, it's all water under the bridge now. I now work for the very friend that created the "dirty dd" in QuickBasic. Steve Bott's wife committed adultery, so maybe he got what he deserved. Despite the roadblocks my father put up in my "quest" with computers, I'm doing just fine. But, having lived in this town for nearly a month now, some interesting things keep creeping up. I meet new and interesting people every day, people who don't really know who I am, but who knew who my father was. Most of the things they have to say about him aren't so nice. He made things more difficult for people here, or he screwed up this or that, or he made this person angry. It's no wonder he fled to the United States, considering he pissed off everyone here, including his own son. In contrast, the things people say about my mother are among the kindest I've heard.

So here I am, once again, cleaning up the ugly mess my father left behind. I'm righting his wrongs and moving things forward. I'm here to live up to my responsibilities as a man: I'm paying off debts, I'm getting along in my life. It's just a shame that I had to learn about my responsibilities on my own, instead of from my own father.