The Last Summer Before Graduation

That summer before my senior year was fairly busy, and I did a variety of different things.  Besides two weeks at Philmont, which I already mentioned, I was selected to go to a leadership camp in Tahoe.  It was called RYLA, and was put on by the Rotary club.  It was composed of one student from each high school in northern California & Nevada.  Most of the students who attended were selected based on their involvement in leadership at their schools.  So there were a bunch of student body presidents, team captains, and yearbook editors there.  Technically, I was slated to lead Thunderpaw Multimedia the next year, as the manager of operations, but really I was sent because I was a top student.  So I spent the week with 150 really outgoing people, which was quite an experience.

It was a very busy time, where the group was formed into a band, a choir, a drama team, and produced a daily paper, and a "yearbook" for the week.  I got the opportunity to learn all sorts of new things.  For example, I got to see someone light their own fart, as well as to experience how bad it smelled trying to try to sleep in that cabin afterwards.  I also became a lot less sheltered in a very short period of time.  Then on the last evening, my cabin decided that I needed a little help “loosening up.”  So after the nine of them pinned me in the bathroom, (with no small amount of resistance) and spiked my hair, they stole my notebook, and turned it in as “lost.”  That usually required one to sing in front of the group, to recover whatever item they had forgotten.  So to my horror, I had to go up in front of the group at dinner, but they weren’t as sadistic as they might seem.  Once I was up there alone for a panicked moment, they came and joined me, which eventually led to my whole cabin singing “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” to all of the girl’s cabins.  (A bit different than Baptist summer camp)

We also wrote letters to future selves, which our counselor, a 50 year old Rotarian, mailed to use around graduation the next year.  Mine had four basic goals, graduate top of my class-check, get into a prestigious university-check (even if I didn’t attend one), earn rank of Eagle Scout-check, and have a talk with W.  Not “go out with W” or “get W to be my girlfriend,” just a very reasonable goal of talk with W.  And of that list, it would seem to be the easiest task by one hundred fold.  But that is all a matter of perspective, depending on one’s strengths and weaknesses.

That same summer, I also did manage to do my Eagle Scout project.  Instead of some outdoorsy, "scouts" type project, I rebuilt the computer lab at my old elementary school.  Most of the staff members had turned over, including the principle, in the three years since I left.  That make it a bit more awkward than I was expecting, since no one knew who I was.  HP had donated a bunch of computers years before, arranged by the Doves, parents of one of the students there.  The computers had never really been setup very well, so I rebuilt the whole room, and networked all of the systems together.  I modified the desks, ran cables under the floors, and setup a server in the adjoining room.  I all went relatively well, but I have no idea if it ever actually got used to its potential after we were finished.  The computers were old when HP donated them, and that had been many years before, so hopefully they have been replaced by now.

The previous summer I had done an internship in the IT department for the County Dept of Public Works, which had been an extremely boring experience, writing feasibility reports when I wasn't troubleshooting problems on outdated equipment.  That next summer, when I wasn’t at RYLA or Philmont, I worked in the IT dept at Coherent, a laser manufacturer.  That was much more exciting, as they had lots of modern new equipment, and I spent a good part of the summer testing "Wi-Fi" wireless network products, which were the newest thing at the time, with a set of ten laptops.  I was also working with two other students from my school, who were friends of mine, so that made it a lot more fun as well.  We got ourselves into and out of all sorts of interesting situations.  One time we got ourselves locked in somewhere, and we were able to get enough wireless signal to hack my boss’s computer, and create a folder called: “Can you come let us out of the inner courtyard?” on his desktop.  From crazy lunch outings to weird conversations with other employees there, it was quite a time.  The comparison between the two experiences convinced me that I never wanted to work for a government agency again, and ten years later, I have no intention of altering that resolution.