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I used Larry as an example because we're from the same city, ironically. My grandparents (the ones I knew anyway) are from the class that repaired electronics; we're the mechanics to their automotive engineers. My grandfather (born in 1919) was obsessed with televisions and repaired them as a side business, so the tools were all around for my dad when he started buying broken microcomputers and fixing them so he could play games. Which in turn taught him enough of the basics (ha) of BASIC and meant that when I was a kid and had basic coding questions he could help. But since we all learned on our own over 3 generations, our facility with tech doesn't 'count'. I can't claim to be completely without privilege: I'm about as well-off as you can get and still be considered from a disadvantaged background: My mother dropped out of high school and ran away at 15 (ironically her family included engineers and at least one MSU professor), so while I never had the money, my socio never really matched my economic, class wise. It's more that if you were any lower on the ladder than I was, you just didn't have a computer or MAYBE you might have something like the 5 free hours of AOL in the late 90s. A computer with hours of internet access in 93 required some privilege. There were a couple of G+T things I did, but I got the money we did scrounge for those from my dad, and once he married my stepmom that stopped because she believed very strongly in gender roles (she wanted me to like clothes shopping and makeup like my sisters and her female relatives) and she also wanted to live in the middle of nowhere. > That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off? Eh, I'm not going to be successful, because doing so would require neglecting either my own health or that of my family. I have MS, and that just explodes the ability to do any kind of career planning. That has its own silver lining, though, because I can say whatever the hell I want. Which is its own kind of freedom: I have a 'get out of hustle free' card. It's almost like skipping from being 25 to 65: I had to do a lot of reckoning with my own mortality, what I was worth if I wasn't able to have a high powered career, what did I actually want out of life, etc. |