I’m not exactly the most technologically savvy person out there. I’d probably still have a flip phone if the one I used to have didn’t quit working. Up until a few months ago, I had a Blackberry. I’m not yet to the point where I’ll have to ask my kids for help adding a new contact, but I can see that happening some day. I had to get my wife’s help emailing these pictures from my phone to the computer.
When I was in college, the school I attended was pretty advanced as far as how “connected” the campus was. I don’t know what the actual ranking was, but I think it was in the “Top 100 Most-Wired Campuses in America” or something like that. Our class was the second or third that the school mandated purchase a specific model of laptop. All our dorm rooms, classrooms, and hangouts had Ethernet connections. It was horrible and clunky by today’s standards, but it was pretty cutting-edge at the time. (Anybody else remember something called a “dongle?”)
Some aspects of living on a wired campus were nice, but back when this was all very new, we had a lot of network outages. Sometimes it was only for a short time, but every now and then they’d last for an hour or more, and it always seemed to happen exactly when you needed connectivity the most. One afternoon I was in my room, trying to get something done online before my next class. The network lost connectivity, and I wasn’t able to do whatever I was trying to do.
For whatever reason, this outage was particularly frustrating for me. Normally I’d just do something else for awhile and check back later to see if the network was back up. This time I figured I’d go in and mess with my computer’s settings; I thought I’d heard some tech-smart friends talking about getting their laptops to work during outages sometimes by changing some of their computers’ settings, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I don’t even remember what I did…I think I changed some ports or something in a tab somewhere. I couldn’t figure anything out and I had to get to class, so I left my computer running on my desk and left for class, frustrated.
When I came back about an hour later, our dorm’s Director and the college’s head IT guy were standing at my door, about to head in. Apparently the network started to come back up, but the settings I changed impacted not just my laptop, but the school’s whole network. Nobody on the college’s IT staff could bring it back up until my computer was either disconnected from the network or the proper settings were restored. It turns out I was an accidental cyberterrorist, and the dorm’s Director had to vouch for me so they didn’t get security involved. “Honest, I’m not a hacker…I just don’t know what I’m doing!” I’m pretty sure they made it so net-wide settings like that couldn’t be changed by unauthorized personnel after that. To all the students that came after me and didn’t have to deal with outages due to fellow students’ actions…you’re welcome.
(Not too long after that we had a weekend where parents came to visit. We were having lunch on Saturday with some of the parents, along with some faculty/staff. The professor that sat with us was one of my teachers, and he was complaining about a recent time when a student actually took down the whole network. He wasn’t laughing at the absurdity of it, he was actually still kind of mad about it. I’m sitting right next to the guy, having a hard time in his class. “Oh really, THAT’S what happened? Man, that’s a shame.”)
Sometimes you make decisions that have an impact on what you’re doing. Sometimes you make decisions that have an impact on what other people are doing. Even worse, with some of these latter decisions, you don’t even realize the ramifications of what you’ve done until it’s after the fact. I crippled the ability of the whole student body to do anything online, and I did it without even knowing it. In order to set things right, an expert in the subject area had to step into the situation and fix it.
There will be times when you’re the goober that gums everything up, and there’ll be times when you’re the one in a position to help make things right. The goal is to minimize the number of times you’re in the first category and to not take it out on the goobers too bad when you’re in the second category.
People make mistakes, and people let you down. We’ve all done it. Some people are extraordinarily talented at holding grudges for even the slightest of mistakes. While it’s true that you should take notice of trends in a person’s “mistake history,” it’s also worth thinking about giving them another chance, especially if you’ve already kept them in the doghouse for awhile. If it were you that messed up, wouldn’t you want another chance?
I’m thinking of getting a t-shirt that says “I was a hacker before it was cool,” but because some people know I can’t even find what I’m looking for on Netflix, I’d probably have to tell this story every time I wore it.