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Brent Csutoras of WeirdAsiaNews.com blog-tagged me, so here goes my obligatory five things people might not know about me and then my five tags.
1) I took the SATs the summer before I started 7th grade. Yes, it was the real SAT and no, they didn’t modify the grading scale. There was a program that found kids who scored in the 99th percentile on their state-mandated standardized tests throughout grade school, and then had us take the SAT with the high school kids. They were using the info for some kind of study, though I never did bother finding out what the study was exactly or what the findings were. My scores were pretty good, so I went ahead and applied for admission to Purdue at the beginning of my freshman year of high school and was accepted. This, of course, made me feel a little too cool for school…. which leads us into item #2
2) I flunked English my junior year of high school, but not because I didn’t do my work or because I had a poor grasp of the concepts. Noooo….. I failed because I pointed out to my teacher that I thought he was an imbecile.
In my defense, he totally started it. I don’t know why he decided he didn’t like me, but he didn’t and it was clear. I maybe might have accidentally rolled my eyes at him once or twice, but that shouldn’t have started WWIII. I was a 16 year old punk kid, and he should have been able to write the snarkiness off as such. In his defense and though he DID start it, I most definitely took great pleasure in the escalation.
The final nail in my English Lit coffin was hammered in when he submitted a comment to the school newspaper regarding his displeasure with a commentary that ran the month previous. As the opinions editor, I was responsible for running the piece and his criticisms of the writers were unwarranted and simply not accurate.
The fun part about his pointless rant was the letter he submitted — to ME — was riddled with grammar mistakes and improper word usage. So here I am with a 500 word, poorly written letter from the person who is my most favorite person in the universe to mock… what to do, what to do? Why…. I corrected it! I got out my handy-dandy red editing pen and I corrected the crap out of that letter, and then I might have taped a copy of the corrected letter to his classroom door… and maybe taped one to his lectern… and I might have distributed copies to a few people. :-)
3) I sold my first business at 20. During the three years I was involved with the ISP, we went through a bitter break-up of the original partnership which resulted in a year and a half of court mandated receivership. We survived receivership (something that normally doesn’t happen because receivership tends to be the predecessor of bankruptcy court) and then went on to have explosive growth, only to get word that the cable company was going to be launching broadband service that would make dial-ups obsolete. We got out at a good time, and the amount of business experience I gained during those three years could last me three lifetimes. The ulcers have since healed, and I still sometimes wish I could go back to 1995 and do some things differently (or at least hang onto all those 3 letter .coms I had). [click to continue...]
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