I decided on Ole Miss for college. It was a beautiful campus and far enough away from my too comfortable hometown scene. Ole Miss is an intensely social environment. I shocked family and friends by joining a fraternity.
I didn't own a computer the entire time I was there. I wrote all my papers on the fraternity's 386 or on friends' MacIntosh's. My past still exerted its influence though. I settled on magazine journalism as a major. My ability to write quickly under pressure was already firmly established. And inevitably I took to doing design and layout using PageMaker on the University Mac's.
I was always the person teaching my friends how to use this word-processor or other program, even if I'd never actually used the program before. I did a lot of trouble-shooting for others, too. I never explained how I knew ``how to do this stuff.'' The Internet was still below the cultural radar so explaining how I met my friends back home was pretty much impossible. It was always strange to people that my friends all went to different high schools.
I graduated, didn't find any journalism work in New Orleans and sort of fell into a job as assistant manager of Martin Wine Cellar in Metairie. That job would lead to my current position with Blue Grass Distributing. Throughout this time my computing knowledge played a role. My success at Blue Grass is largely due to my computing skills.
I did buy a PC of my own. It didn't take too long to become frustrated with the limitations of DOS and Windows3.1. Luckily, you don't have to spend too much time on the Internet before you encounter someone proseletyzing about the joy of Linux.