So, since I'm awake this early on a fine Sunday morning; it's story time;
So back in the old days when I was in elementary school, we're talking about 1982 or so. Well, arcades were huge to us so we spent every waking minute trying to get money for us to feed in a child's version of a slot machine that video games were, Now in the Tri-state area the school system was setup so that all the boys had to take vocational studies and the girls had home economics. We also had to take a class called Skills For Living; this was a class that taught us how to make budgets and balance check books and how to pay a bill and things of that nature, I wish they still taught this but I digress.
Now, before you guys get your injustice boners warmed up, we did switch later and had to take home ec as well.So here I am at 12 years old and having to choose between auto mechanics, wood shop or metal shop. I chose metal shop, this tale is about how I almost got the metal shop program shut down. You see after I learned a bit about the equipment I had a brainstorm. if I used the drill press to drill a hole in the edge of a quarter, I could tie a string through it and use it to get free credits at the arcade by letting it trigger the switch that awarded a credit and then jiggling it back and forth to get more.
I was a genius! I could play video games at no cost! Revision two brought a piano wire to the equation which accounted for the one problem of the string breaking and requiring a new tool made. Overnight arcade profits dropped through the floor as I was not smart enough to keep my idea to myself. Well after a few months word got back to the school and we were all reprimanded and watched far more strictly than before. No more unsupervised projects and back to boring old lunchboxes and what not.
For one shining moment I was king of the 5th grade, too bad I never got that gun and silencer project off the ground before it went up in smoke....
