9 min read
this is a real life story on the events that lead me to getting my first paid job, and it's not as orthodox as you may think...
so this is another one of my high school stories that stood out since it led me to getting my foot in the door at Rocketspark. and it's not what you might think.
I was not very good at the whole school thing. my mind often drifted off or I feel asleep during class because I was just so not interested in learning how to solve algebraic equations or how to correctly write an essay.
I often did a bunch of other stuff while sitting in these lessons, and a lot of it was programming and learning more about technology and I.T.
one day, my friend group at the time are sitting around the library table like we always do, and we are complaining about the school internet yet again. this is pretty routine, since the entire library network runs off a single starved AP running on a wall. we are on the opposite side of the library to this wall, so we have the worst signal out of everyone there.
being an older school, the library had already installed a bunch of ethernet ports on the walls and floor space of the library, presumably ready for computer labs to go in or something like that. I was curious though, could these be live? having our own AP would really solve the internet issue really.
so one day I bring an old telecom modem we had in a closet of our house getting disuse. I set it up to be in access point mode ahead of time, and bring it in my bag to school. my friends are a little cautious, but this is basically just harmless fun, making our own wifi network did seem pretty cool.
we plugged it in and sure enough, the ports in the floor were live, and the best thing of all, they were fast. we immediately started up our own hidden wifi network and reaped the benefits of the new speeds. however, the wifi still had the usual school blocking on it and per-student login, so really the speed was the key difference.
so from this point, we would have an operation where I would come in at the beginning of lunch and plug it in, keeping it in my bag to deter teachers or students being suspicious about it. we started a gang of sorts, where all the nerds in the library got access to this cool hidden network. I remember the password being like "startrek" or something..
people would hear about it from other people, and spread the password around, until we had like 10-20 people on it at once, and people started to rely on it.
we needed a place to run it all the time. people were getting annoyed when i wasn't at school, or if i was late. we scoped out the library, and we had gained enough street cred at this point where we could trust some of the librarians with it. we had secured a spot underneath one of the library computers with a solid power and ethernet connection. we planted the modem, and it was happy days.
the librarians kept quiet about it, and they reaped the benefits. this was such a great time, and we also opened the network to not be hidden anymore, which to be honest, was not a good idea in the slightest.
one day, one of my mates is "guarding" the access point. this is when one of the IT guys at the school notices theres a few more flashing lights down below the library computer. he is a little suspicious, so he asks around to see if any of the other IT dudes have put it there. no one owns up. at this point the jig is up and he is on to us. he has an idea to find the owner; unplug it and see who comes and plugs it back in.
so he unplugs it, and leaves.
i stroll into the library, expecting my phone to automatically connect to the network, but for some reason, it's not there. what could've happened? i go round to the library computer, and see it's unplugged, and simply, plug it back in again. nothing happens, lunch time is normal, and it's only because he was on lunch too that he missed the mark!
the IT guy comes back and he then finally asks the person who is meant to be guarding the access point about it, and he crumbles like pie. he rats me out and comes and gets me to hand me over to the rozzers.
the IT guy takes the "device" and will let me know what is going to happen.
on the same day, I am in digital class. I am using one of the schools computers, when all of a sudden, a message pops up. "Come to IT block", no sender. at this time, I didn't even know they could send us messages on the school computers to our accounts, who knows what else they could see. to this day, I don't know if this was some kind of tactic to be a bit ominous, since they could have easily called the classroom on the phone system the school used.
I walk closer to the IT block, kind of nervous since I have no idea what I am walking into here. the room is dark and small. my modem is sitting on a table with its cables still plugged in. i see the IT guy I know who found me out, sitting on a chair, next to, the network administrator.
this guy looks pissed. he is bald and looks like he does not like his job.
- please excuse dialogue here, this happened quite a while ago, so I don't remember specifics, but it went something like this -
"Ah, so you're the one who owns this device" says the network admin.
"Yep" as I let out quite a big gulp.
"You know these things aren't allowed, right?" he responds
I try to be a smart ass and give him a "Welllllll".
He asks me for my name, which I reluctantly answer, "Ryan".
He knods and goes "Ahhh yes", like he knows my name.
"We have seen you around here and there" he explains.
I am absolutely shitting myself at this point.
"Look this is not a good situation, you cannot bring these devices into the school, we don't know what's on them, and they could infect our network. How did you even make this work?" he questioned.
I explained the access point mode of the modem, and that I didn't put any VPN or any bypass on it, and it was quite literally just a fix for the one AP in the library.
"Ah, okay, well yeah we can't let you have this, you'll need to take it home." he says assertively.
"But hey look, if you find anything wrong with the network or anything you probably shouldn't be able to access, please tell us" he said
this surprised me a little, as it felt like I had impressed him for abusing the fact they kept all ethernet ports live.
I left quite promptly after this, and shared the news to my friends back in digital class, who were all eagerly awaiting my return.
so I thought that was that, they eventually gave me back the modem as they found no malware on it (lol), and i vowed never to do it again. but a few days later, my parents get an email..
turns out the vice principal has caught wind of this, and she is pissed. obviously the network admin has told her about the incident, and it flew straight over her head and snowballed into a "network breach".
the email my parents got was serious. so serious they were considering expelling me for the action. this is why I believe it went over their heads, since I didn't even really do anything bad, and the network admin guy also seemed kinda chill after I explained everything.
so anyway, this is a closed door meeting, so I was kept in the dark about what they were discussing. my dad kind of knew what I was doing, and also believed it was blown out of proportion, so he tried to form an angle that I am literally just bored at school and need something to challenge me in the digital space, which actually was kind of true.
he really tried for me and basically bullshitted his way into getting the vice principal to not expel me. in the end, it was decided that I would just get a warning and I can never do it again, and they could probably turn this curiosity into something good. even though I didn't even really do anything that bad..
so the vice principal actually did something to challenge me. she got me a job. turns out theres this tech company wanting to work with the school that builds software, mainly a website builder. and they are interested in taking me in after school as an unpaid internship...
"Okay then.." I said to the vice principal, I can go and do that. this then formed into a great opportunity for me since I actually kind of knew how to program already, and they used PHP, a language I knew, and man the look on their faces when I did the crappy vue + php tutorial in 1 night, they were amazed.
so yeah, thats the story how I got my job at Rocketspark, and I am still there to this day, 7 years later.
I still think about this frequently and it's quite funny if you look at it now. I really don't know how I pulled that off or why they even went so far as to give me an internship, when they easily could've just dumped me.
this also put me on their radar as a tech guy, which I sort of wasn't before. I suddenly found myself helping out with year 9 tech setup days, and livestreamed assembly production, which I am all for.
in my last year of school, I was contacted by one of the other vice principals at the time, and he wanted me to make a whole website for them for juniors at the school to get points for good behavior, and they can spend those points at a shop and get canteen vouchers and such. They are actually still using that system 4 years after leaving school, and you can read about it in one of my other writings (coming soon).