I’ve been working through my childhood in therapy lately and asking myself what drives me to fix things: problems, computers, code, people, etc. And with enough work I’ve pinpointed it to a single interaction that I’ll recount here. I don’t recall how old I was, exactly, but we’ll place the time period around Windows 95.
It was a typical evening in the Gennari house. I would say probably sometime after dinner and before bed. And I recall the phone ringing and my mom handing the phone off to my dad. To date myself, these were the times when phones were attached to walls. If you were lucky, the cord to the handset was long enough you could walk around the corner. I was sitting at the dinner table, probably finishing homework when my motioned to me.
He recounted how gramps (my mom’s grandfather) was on the phone and was having trouble with his computer. I was the resident wiz-kid with computers, so naturally my dad asked if I could help. The problem was gramps had adjusted his monitor resolution and now his screen was all wiggly.
A typical Windows 95 display settings dialog
So without skipping a beat I proceeded to rattle off the keyboard commands to reset his monitor resolution:
“Gramps, press Windows key plus R.”
“What’s the Windows key?”
“The one with the flag. Hold it and press R.”
“Okay, I see a box.”
“Type ‘desk.cpl’ and press Enter.”
“D-E-S-K dot C-P-L… okay.”
“Press Ctrl-Tab three times to get to Settings.”
“Got it.”
“Now Tab five times to get to the resolution dropdown, then press down arrow twice.”
“Okay… oh! Everything looks normal again!”
And with that, gramps’ screen was back to normal. I remember the look on my dad’s face. His jaw was on the floor. As I kid I found my currency. This was how I’d trade my skills for attention. Fast forward to today and I still look for that same gratification.