Skiddish
Act 5: Tinkerer’s High
Ah, high school—the golden age of LAN parties and laughably slow broadband connections. Picture this: My friends and I making do with download speeds that hovered around 1 to 3 Mbps and data caps that made us stingier than a coupon-clipping grandma. So, what did we do? We became digital Robin Hoods, each of us downloading different games before meeting up to share the digital loot. It was a challenge, alright. Imagine booting up a game and finding out it’s in Russian. Or worse, the rar was corrupt. But hey, that’s what made it fun; we had to get it to work without blasting through our monthly download cap.
Now, I was already a tiny rebel, sneaking in games of Halo: CE and Call of Duty during class. Alt-tab was my best friend whenever a teacher looked my way. But then, I leveled up my mischief skills. How? By swapping out the CoD executable with a nifty little batch file I whipped up. This baby would change a user’s password to something random and save it to a hidden file. All of this before launching the game. Let’s just say the library staff were a little busy resetting passwords.
As it turned out, our school’s network security was Swiss cheese. Seriously, a simple right-click on the Start menu got us to a “Run” prompt, which was about as secure as a wet paper bag. From there, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to the forbidden fruit—teachers' shared drives, that meant exams, assignments, and even the source of the library’s web server. We could grant ourselves staff-level access to services! Yeah, that stunt earned me a trip to the principal’s office and a suspension, but boy, did it make no real difference in my life.
That high school phase wasn’t just about playing games or skirting the rules. Nah, the real thrill was in tweaking these systems, tailoring them to do exactly what I wanted. From modding Wiis to becoming the go-to iPhone repair guy, it was clear: I was hooked on the pure adrenaline of technological tinkering.