Saturday, 09 January 2010

• How Asperger's helped me to Succeed

  If you have read my blog at all then you are probably painfully aware that there is no rhyme or reason to the topics I post on from day to day. I write about whatever comes to my mind that day, and if nothing comes to mind then I do not write. Today I would like to share with you a page out of a fictional book I like to call Asperger’s 101. This is about my obsession with computers. This is a synopsis of my life in the computer world, and covers about 24 years of time, three states and three marriages. I am only telling the computer part of the story, so I am sorry if it may be a hard read to follow. I firmly believe that all I have been able to accomplish it my life I owe to the fact that I have Asperger’s. If I were not on the spectrum I do not think I would be the man I am today, and I am proud of the man that I am.

  When I was around 12 years old I was like every other person in the world, I had a dream. When we would go shopping or after school when I would find myself at a certain department store I would put all the quarters I had into the Donkey Kong, or Pac Man machine, then I would head inside and I would always gravitate to the electronics section, it was like my own promised land. Once there I would drool like a rabid dog over the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A it was beautiful, but I could never afford such a wonderful piece of technology.” Someday” I would tell myself. Not long after that we got an Atari 2600 with breakout, pong, and space invaders; I thought surely if the world were to end today I would die happy.   
  

  About a year after I moved in with my great-grandmother I somehow managed to convince her to buy me a Commodore Vic-20 which was a high dollar item back then. One day I was watching this show on TV about this kid who’s dad was divorced from his mom and he worked in technology designing the most cutting edge computer stuff (you have to remember this was like 1983) and he would send all this stuff to his son who would just plug it in and it would work right away. Then he would use the computer to create things like artificial life or solve crimes, or hack into the government databases. SO, anyway I took apart my Vic-20 thinking I was some kind of genius and it never worked again.

  After several months of begging I was able to score a Commodore 64 with an external 5 ¼ floppy and a 300 baud cartridge modem. I was even able to get a subscription to a new cutting edge BBS called Q-Link (later renamed to America on Line). I have fond memories of those good old days when you could cut a hole in the floppy with a pair of scissors so that you could use the other side and double your storage space. I also remember buying 100 games off of this kid for $500 and then finding out they were all pirated copies (I was told they were his used games he did not want anymore) and him refusing to give me my money back, half of the games did not even work. Lesson learned pirating is bad, don’t do it.

  I took the Commodore 64 with me when I moved to Florida, but I ended up pawning it because I needed money. I was living with my mom, I was a Jr High drop out, with no car, and no hope for a better life in sight. It was then that I met a guy named Gary and he convinced me to break into a building and steal (can you guess what we stole?) That’s right a computer. Once he was able to convince me that the rules somehow didn’t apply to me I was able to look past the fact it was a crime, and I started to realize that maybe the computer we stole could somehow be my ticket to a better life. That maybe if I somehow learned to master it that I could make a life for myself and that my existence would finally have some value. That maybe someone would even love me and want to be around me. We were caught and I confessed, I didn’t even try to lie. There was no excuss for what I did, it was wrong plain and simple and I took the punishment that I deserved. I received five years probation and was released after two and a half for model behavior. My criminal record was sealed and expunged after my release and I was given a second chance. A chance that I would not waste.

  It would be about 6 years before I would get another computer, and my life would change forever. When I was about 23 I spent my income tax return and some money I had saved up to buy an IBM PC which cost me about $3000 dollars and was an 8086 processor with 512k of ram and a 10 megabyte hard drive. It came loaded with Dos 6 and Windows 3.1 for workgroups and I wanted to know how it worked so I took it apart.

  It took me about a week to figure out how to get everything back together, and once I did it didn’t work; I was mad. I talked to a friend who had a friend who worked at radio shack or something and he agreed to come over one day after work and fix it for twenty dollars. I remember thinking to myself my God he gets twenty bucks for this what a rip off, I better watch what he does so I can figure it out myself next time because I am not paying him again. Well it turned out I plugged a cable in wrong or didn’t have the memory or processor seated right or something simple like that, but I didn’t know how simple it was at the time. Right after he fixed it and left I turned it off and tore it apart, and I was again unable to put it back together and fix it but I was going to learn and I was not going to call the repair man again. Nine days later I was able to put the PC back together and it worked. I was so proud; I had found my lives work.

  Now that I had mastered disassembling and reassembling the PC (at least in my own mind) I was ready to tackle the operating system so I looked up on the Internet how to format a hard drive and I did. I had, however, failed to look up how to reinstall it before I did though, so I did not know what jumper setting or hardware interrupt to use for the sound card and modem and so after several days with no success I once again was at the mercy of my friend’s friend. Once again I carefully watched and vowed to repeat the process on my own after he left, and I asked lots of questions and took notes as I had before. Just as before as soon as he had left I looked over my notes and a wave of confidence flowed over me and I wiped the hard drive, and just like the time before it took me several days to get everything working again. Once I was able to reinstall the OS I was so proud I felt like I had control of the world. After that I decided I would get a job at best buy. I applied and I was hired to sell PC’s on the spot, and within 6 months I had worked my way up to in-home technician (they replaced in-home technicians with the geek squad).

  About 6 more months past and I decided it was time to go and get my GED, since I quit school in the 6^thgrade. I got the third highest score on the test they had seen all year, and I never even cracked open a book to study. Now that I had my GED I wanted something bigger, but I had a problem I have never been able to hold a job more than 6 months or so and many I was only able to keep a few days. I had a dream though and I talked my way into a tech job at a small computer repair shop for $400 a week and learned all I could. I even taught myself access database design so that I could do database programming for a client who needed some work done. I would buy book after book on everything from operating systems, to servers (Microsoft, Novell) and office. I would eagerly flip to the back page of the book and rip out the trial CD with the software on it and throw the book away without reading it. I didn’t want the book, I wanted the CD and every minute I read was a minute I wasn’t playing with my newest project.

  And, so it went as I moved from one small shop to another, each one bringing with it more experience and more responsibilities. I do not remember how long it was, but after about 5 years I had managed to land a job as the lead technician at the Florida headquarters of a chain of nine computer stores across five states. I was now building, installing software on, and shipping 50-100 PC’s a week personally to colleges, resellers, businesses and municipalities all over the USA. After that company went bankrupt I moved to a small company as their network and exchange administrator and lead technician in the same town, and worked there certifying their systems as Microsoft™ OEM standard. It was only about a year there before the work began to dry up, and I was laid off.

  I was tired of the computer job roller coaster and was starting to rethink my career choice. I had been beat down and taken advantage of for too long, I needed a break from the pressures of life. So I locked myself away in my house and shut down for almost three years while I healed. I spent much of this time playing online role playing games and formatting my hard drive and reinstalling the OS became a monthly ritual. It was during this time that I discovered Linux and I was in love, I wanted to master it completely. I spent years building Linux distributions from scratch and my favorite distribution was Gentoo®. I would spend months on one install, and if I got one little step wrong I would format it and start all over. I even got to the point where I was imagining the install in stages so I could go back to the prior stage if I made a mistake. I was very content with my life, until the money ran out; the rent was two months overdue. My sister’s, brother, mom, and a lady named Lisa who had befriended me had been looking out for me, and praying for me, and one day I looked around and realized I was living in a slum in the ghetto with no electricity, and all but the living room windows were broken out. I had even moved my couch and dressers and anything else I could into the hallway to block people from being able to enter through the bedroom windows and began sleeping on the floor in the living room. Just a few months prior to this there had been a drug raid next door where they were selling crack out of an abandon apartment and someone was shot. It was time to pull myself out of my cocoon and return to the world of the living. My sister loaned me a car, and helped me find a room to rent and I reentered the world.

  I had just spent about three years in isolation locked inside my house afraid of the world and rethinking life, and within a year of ending the self imposed isolation I met and had married my third (current) wife. We decided to return to Ohio rather than live in Florida and I still needed a new meaning and purpose in my life, but once in Ohio I needed a job so I applied for a job with Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Elections Systems) and was hired right away. I was placed as the sole technician in charge of the third largest county in the entire state. Once again I rapidly excelled and was put in charge of a second county, then a third and a fourth. I was now handling elections servers and voting machines for most of Northwest Ohio; I think I had been with the company less than a year at this time. With nothing more than a GED and a dream I had worked myself up from those early days of watching a TV show and tearing apart my Commodore Vic-20 to having the board of elections in the third largest county in Ohio asking me to apply for a $60,000 a year government job in their office. I did not get that job, but it came down to just one other person and me. He got the job and looking back I am glad he did.

  I was diagnosed with Asperger’s shortly after that, and I decided to go to college. I am in my third year now with a double major in psychology and social work, and my new passion is writing, speaking and educating people about hidden disabilities and Asperger’s/autism in particular. I want to show the world what is possible with understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. Through it all I never considered myself a success, but reading what I just wrote I am amazed I was so blessed. I used to think getting into a big ten school was all that mattered, and I alienated people without realizing it. I was afraid to speak about my past out of fear that it would be held against me when it came time to apply for grad school or a job, and that it would hold me back. I still want to go on to a good graduate school and get my master’s at least if not my Ph. D, but I am not afraid to tell my story anymore. Although I will be heavily in debt with student loans and in my mid forty’s when I am finished with school I pray I am half as successful with this new passion as I was with the last one.
  

  
  

  How do you measure success?

  
  

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