Every weird, nerdy kid has some stories – let’s start sharing them – this one will be about the Oregon Trail Tragedy. I decided to start telling stories about being a weird, nerdy kid in the Xennial 80s. Please feel welcomed to share some of your own. I’ll start with one of my tamer stories – dealing with Computer Lab. I call this story:
Oregon Trail Tragedy and Other Failures
Millenials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha – you don’t know. You’ll never know the irritating, dibilitating frustration that came from Computer Lab. For those of us in the Before Times – Computer Lab was getting out of school early, pizza for lunch, and ‘sit right here and watch this movie’ all rolled into one. You couldn’t beat Computer Lab – because this is the place where you actually got to use one of those Apple II machines that Steve Jobs gave away to elementary schools back in the 80s.
The visceral experience of that olive-drab housing and green LED screens, the clickety-clickety-click sound of the 5 1/4″ floppy drive. You disappeared into a new world of discovery and adventure. No more rules, no more boring history lessons where the best you could hope for was a C+. This was real, this was fun, this was what I wanted to spend my time doing.
Not that we got a computer at home. “Tell me why I should spend my money on that?” was the sarcastic parental refrain, as if a seven-year-old knew anything about cost/benefit analysis or return on investment. My first PC wouldn’t arrive until years later, but never mind that now. It’s time to discuss Oregon Trail, or rather, the tragedy.
The two games I really enjoyed playing were Oregon Trail and Car Builder. You can play them online now, but back then you had to get through the stupid math game challenge with a 80% or better before the teacher let you play. So imagine my dilemma – I can skip through the math game challenge in five minutes – and then 45 minutes of Oregon Trail. But no, my partner – a dim-witted individual who smelled of farts and paste – had to agree on my answer. He didn’t always – sometimes HE wanted to pick the answer, even if it was wrong. We ended up arguing for half the period on wrong answers, leaving us MAYBE 30 seconds or so to play Oregon Trail. I couldn’t even finish buying stuff at the general store in St. Louis!
I will say, as long as we’re on the topic, that Oregon Trail was frustration unto itself. You never got enough time to read the instructions on how to shoot and move, so it wasn’t until years later that I realized you *could* move. I’d always get stuck in the far corner and maybe I’d kill a squirrel while the bear and bison danced just out of sight. Jerks.
But then there was Car Builder and again, my stupid partner knew *nothing* about cars. I knew some stuff – my Dad kept a stack of old Road & Track magazines for me to look at the pictures. Can’t convince him that a DOHC turbocharged V8 was better than an SOHC L4 (“I like S better!”). That’s why we always ended up with an underpowered version of my grandma’s sedan that couldn’t corner to save its life or pass the wind tunnel test. I hope you’re happy, Roland.* You wrecked my childhood.
Well, not all of it.
Anyway, the point of the Apple II in my second-grade classroom was to make me realize two things. One, computers and technology were where I was going with my life. Two, group projects sucked. I have more examples of that but we’ll save it for another time.
That’s it for my first Weird Nerdy Kid Stories – hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to share your own Weird Nerdy Kid Stories with me on BlueSky and Mastodon. We’ll do this again, soon.