I was living with a couple buddies; Simon and Peter. When we’d only been there a couple weeks I realized that I hadn’t tried the back door key yet. While at the Dollar Store one afternoon I decided I would try that night. It was at this same dollar store that I bought a couple cap guns and caps.

I think you know where this is going.

I got home late that night from work and snuck around back and started fiddling with the lock. It popped, and I just started pushing the door through the tight jam into the kitchen when I saw them walk in to investigate the noise. I ducked back into the darkness and watched them check out the floors as if for rats. I tightened my grip around the two cap-loaded guns and hoped that the door was just perched on the jam enough… With full force I kicked the door in and started shooting both guns at the guys. The caps were rewardingly much louder than I had anticipated.

They were totally caught off guard! Simon clumsily ran into the wall then did a staggered jump into the hallway. It was like his body couldn’t run away fast enough. Pete on the otherhand was a lot scarier. His initial startled “ah!” turned into a full out roar . He literally went into a full hulk-out stance and was ready to destroy me. It was the perfect examples of fight vs. flight.

All of us there with adrenaline pumping had a pretty good laugh. Though I always wondered, if I wore my gas mask (as I had considered) for full scary effect, if Pete would have actually ripped my arms off.

This computer was an absolute monster compared to the computers friends or school had.  It had a 233mHz processor and an incredible 4GB of memory (sobering to think that a 4GB thumb drive might be the prize in a box of cereal these days). More incredible was the fact that my Dad sprung for a 17″ monitor – the likes of which I had never seen; AND a SCSI (scuzzy) Scanner! (Scanners were the stuff of legend at the time).

I spent countless hours playing with this computer; and dabbling in Adobe Photo Deluxe 1.0 (the ancestor of Photoshop Elements perhaps?) and learning a lot about computer maintenance.

It would be with this computer that I would learn about image optimization, OCR, and make my first website. I’m sure at the time getting a top of the line computer with these peripherals must have been ludicrously expensive, but without it I might not have gotten into Graphic Design or Web Design… or spent thousands of hours playing FPS!