When I was 10 years old my dad gave me a Radio Shack 50-in 1 electronic project kit for my birthday, and the first time I heard my voice come out of the speaker I was hooked. I started buying electronics magazines to read about all the kit projects I couldn't afford, let alone assemble with dad's soldering iron (gee it fixed the plumbing though), and I was excited.
At 14 I bought my first data book, a National Linear. It was blue and orange, and full of IC's and the schematics that would make them do cool things. Then I learned about logic and got a CMOS data book as well. While my friends probably had a pile of Hustler mags under their beds, I would sit up until 3AM poring over my data books and dreaming about all the amazing devices I was going to design one day. When I got my first circuit working with an LM555 I knew there was no stopping me.
And so I abandoned my plans to become an architect and enrolled for engineering instead. Most of the money I earned pumping petrol, I spent on new output transistors for the kit amps I kept blowing up, or new speakers for the ones I didn't. I had started designing my own basic circuits, mostly by adapting schematics out of magazines, and I came up with brilliant ideas like automatic rain-sensing windscreen wipers. (That one worked, well in a downpour anyway, so I guess it needed a little refinement. About 20 years later Puegot started using the same idea, so I wasn't completely misguided, just too ambitious). But still I wanted to learn more and more about design so I studied and read and soldered and found out what 240V through the heart felt like. I had brains and enthusiasm and ideas, and I knew that combination would one day make me rich and respected and I'd get to name some cool circuit after me, just like Butterworth or Schottky or Colpitts. The electronics industry seemed to have an obvious hole in it - the salesmen knew nothing, and the geeks couldn't sell anything, so all I had to do was graduate, choose my weapon and devour the world.
Two years out of university and things were on track. I had my own business and at least one good customer and I spent my spare time designing a range of products. The first few were rubbish and I still feel guilty for accepting money for them, but people seemed to have faith in my enthusiasm so they kept coming back and I kept improving, and some of the stuff we made actually worked quite well. Something wasn't right though. My discrete designs never performed that well and books didn't tell me how to fix them. I started taking circuits from magazines instead, or borrowing ideas from competitors products, and in the end I gave up and just used I.C.'s and the trusty old collection of National and Motorola data books. The bills got paid, even if it did take 80 hours a week at the bench.
Things grew, things changed. Some things worked and others didn't, we did some stupid projects but nobody got killed or sued me. Gradually I started to find that good ideas or hard work don't amount to shit when you're up against salesmen and spin doctors, and so my disillusionment grew. The more complex our products became, the more complex their problems, and nothing is quite as crushing as delivering the first run of a new device, only to receive a phone call to say "they work fine on the bench but they all oscillate on site, fix them now!" And so the miracle of xanax began to help me through those difficult projects.
I was mostly honest, but I got screwed. Nobody sent me broke but it all wore me down. Designing didn't seem such fun any more when anything I could design, could be bought from China for fifteen dollars. We made our money in contracting installation services to the building industry, brute work with the twin evils of Site Managers and Unions, while I was always trying to design that ultimate range of critically acclaimed products, making batches of 25 or 50 or 100 and no too batches the same.
I got engaged to a doctor. I was 38. My parents were overjoyed.
And then one day, after 15 years in business, one particular guy stitched me up in a very ungentlemanly fashion and cost me my biggest customer. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it, agreed my psychiatrist, and wrote a repeat for Zoloft. Nothing was fun any more and I found myself sleeping on the floor of my office on Saturday afternoons, when I should have been tweaking my new designs. Working late was downloading p*rn off that new thing, the internet, and I couldn't be bothered designing anything new. Nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to anyway, and besides we were still analogue in a world going digital. Between the panic attacks and depression the only thing that appealed to me was picking up girls on the net and I had affairs, which out of guilt I confessed to my fiance and that was the end of that.
My life sucked and I would sleep until midday and expect the guys at work to hold it together for me. Which they mostly did. And so one day I rang a guy I knew and asked him to contact my competitor, and see if he would buy me out.
Two years later it finally happened, he bought most of the business for not much more than the value of the stock but it was something. I had no plans but a guy I met on the internet had started a p*rn site and asked me if I could come up with some ideas, so I did and he started paying me money. Before too long I was feeling much better and coming up with some cool ideas for web sites of my own, so he helped me start one and gave me a desk in his building to work from. I spent more and more time there. It was great fun, thinking up ideas for photo shoots and hanging around with cool nekkid girls, while the last 2 guys left in my fading electronics empire limped along churning out small quantities of stuff at the old factory, the part of the business I couldn't sell.
Very late one night I got a call from the security company that there was an alarm at the old building. So I hauled my arse down there to find it was a soldering iron left on, or some such thing. I hadn't even been there for many weeks and I noticed my desk looked unfamiliar. It had piles and piles of papers, 10 years accumulation, that didn't seem to matter any more, and the walls were covered in personal things which didn't seem to be a part of me any more either. My bookshelves were stuffed with references that suddenly, I realsied, I would never again open, and they smelled a bit musty. And right up the top in a neat row was my complete collection of National Semiconductor data books, right down to the 1973 Linear edition, the one that kicked all this off, the cover held on with tape.
I wandered down the back, past the other offices and through the workshop. Everything seemed much older and dirtier. The wall is covered in hundreds of bins of parts, IC's, switches,relays and every passive value you could get, in reels of 1000 no less. This was the likes of which I could only dream about at age 15. Oh to have all this at my disposal so I could dream up cool things and just sit down and MAKE them without having to wait for my next $12 pay packet and queue up at McGrath's for my piddling shopping list of resistors and diodes! But it didn't matter to me now. I thumbed through the drawers and pulled a few open, and eventually I came across a little set of 8 clear plastic drawers in a tin cabinet. I remember buying this with $2 my grandma gave me when I was 14, and inside I found a little jumble of parts, some half watt resistors and even a germanium transistor or two, and a ferrite rod wrapped in wire by my own teenage hands; among the first components I had every bought, nearly 30 years ago. Like a seed they had germinated all THIS, I thought, but maybe spread more like weeds? And so I realised, after 20 years, that I had ruined a perfectly good hobby by turning it into a profession; that was really the problem. And so I cleared my desk into the dumpster and locked the door for the last time.
Two years later and my web sites are doing very well. They may be p*rn but they are good p*rn, respectful to the models and customers alike, and I employ 8 people. The old electronic business is still hanging in there but I only stop by to use the workshop for some hobby welding or to sign documents. I can't tell my mother what I do, in fact most of my friends don't know either, but my sites are good and I'm proud of them, in a pervy way. Tonight I was interviewed on the radio from the other side of the world and I came home to my beautiful wife, who is a photographer and model, half my age, and we talked about the new house we're going to buy. I turned on the computer to check my sites and answer some emails, but I don't look at p*rn any more. (After only 2 years, I have ruined another perfectly good hobby.)
I opened my news reader and came across this group, where I used to post perplexing questions and some of you kindly helped me out. I read a few posts and answered a few too, but they were very simple things, and I still feel no more knowledgeable than I did at 15, and everybody else seems to know more. It's funny how time works, you never actually feel any older, you just feel sort of dumber and less useful, but nothing seems to matter as much. Nobody cured my nervous breakdown from the late 90's, least of all the drugs, I guess I just grew out of it. I am still the same person I was at 14, but I can't help wondering how all this happened; how a "boy genius" high achiever with good intentions and enthusiasm, with a grammar school education and from a middle class home, with parents of impeccable morals and the highest community respect, with a university degree in engineering; became a 44 year old professional pervert.
Perhaps the answer was there 30 years ago. If I had just ditched the Linear Data Book and picked up a pile of Hustlers like the other guys, maybe I could have saved myself 20 years of grief. And just perhaps, the worst is yet to come; but for now, I have never been happier in my entire life.