#11 Instant Regret

Before Bill Saved us From Ourselves

I liked clubbing my first couple of years in college, but I couldn’t always get there (no car). Late one Friday night, I wanted to mimic a club by turning off the hallway lights and blasting music from my room. I opened the fuse box in my dorm and randomly flipped switches.

A girl came out of a room and told me that the power outage had caused her to lose her work and asked if I could help her get it back. I was one of the resident computer geeks. This was pre-Windows. The work hadn’t been saved. There was no getting it back.

That was the first truly subversive thing I’d ever done, and the consequences had been immediate. I took it as a message from the universe. I still think about that girl a lot and the work that I’d destroyed. I hope she’s ok.