What age were you when you realized you had a gift?
Maybe you haven’t gotten to that point in your life yet or
discovered your passion, but that’s okay.
Most people spend their entire lives looking for it, but never
really find it. I guess that’s okay too, but I wish you the best of luck in your exploration.
For me, it was when I was in high school. I was playing around on an iPad that I got as a Christmas gift from my parents when I went into the app store and found a writing application that I wanted to download.
I loved to write; I was creative.
I still am.
I played sports, got good grades, but there was nothing better
than going home, smoking marijuana, and writing.
The problem, however, was that the app cost twenty-five
dollars. Real American money. Twenty-five. This particular application lets you do everything, write, type, edit, add photos, add dancing characters. It was great. But I certainly wasn’t paying twenty-five dollars.
At the risk that the statute of limitations hasn’t expired on this sort of thing yet, I’ll tell you anyway. I got to the point in the process where the app store asks you for your credit card number. However, two weeks before this activity I was about to partake in, one of my
friends, Jillian, showed me an excellent hack to get around paying for applications like this.
She was a computer nerd, and she knew all of the latest hacking tricks and coding terminology. That stuff wasn’t my thing until that moment when she showed me. Besides smoking weed and writing, there probably isn’t anything else I love more than being able to put a real-life puzzle together.
But I digress.
She showed me a technique where you can open up the terminal on your device, and at the same time the app was open, put in a sophisticated line of code that would fool the app store into thinking you just entered a verified credit card number.
Fucking brilliant.
I was hooked.
I was always a rebel in my youth; I still am, but I wasn’t
rebellious in a way where I would get in trouble at school or at home. It was a sneaky rebellion, smoking marijuana in the days where my classmate’s parents called it the “devil’s lettuce” or drinking occasionally on the weekends. Authority for the sake of authority never sat well with me, so when Jillian showed me this hack, it just bordered the edge between too far and perfect.
I didn’t like stealing, never felt it was right, but I wasn’t paying twenty-five dollars to be able to write some stories.
I meticulously entered the line of code that she showed me into the terminal on the iPad. Not every app was the same, obviously, so
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you had to change certain lines of the base code to correlate it with the specific program you were working on. In less than two minutes, the app store was tricked, and my writing program installed.
That was eight years ago.
Now I work as an advisor for the most secretive society in the world.
