iWoz by Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith Read Free Book Online

grade. I really stopped enjoying school so much. Socially, I went straight to the bottom.
I think of the years after that, seventh and eighth grades especially, as terrible years. Where before I was popular and riding bikes and everything, suddenly I was socially shut out and not popular at all. It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the longest time. I was in the advanced classes and got good grades, but I didn't have much enjoyment doing it.
As an example, I remember few teachers from those bad years.
The only way I can explain it is that when kids that age start getting social, your position in the group starts getting important to a lot of people. I've watched this happen with my own kids and the kids I've taught. Who are the talkers? Who makes the decisions? Who rises to the top? And because I became so shy when I hit adolescence—well, I just went to the bottom. It was a tremendous shock for me. Except for the science projects, which still got me recognized by my teachers and grown-ups, I felt terribly awkward. I couldn't identify with other kids my age anymore. The way they spoke—I felt like I didn't know their language anymore. And I'd feel too scared to talk because I thought I'd say the wrong thing.
At the same time I was starting to feel advanced, science- and electronics-wise, I felt shunned by all these kids who suddenly, and for no reason I could understand, just couldn't accept me anymore. I did electronics when a lot of others started hanging out and partying and drinking and going to, well, I guess you would call them make-out parties.
This started in sixth grade, and in many ways, that shyness is still with me. Even today. I have friends who can just go up and talk to anybody. They're suave and make friends so easily. Small talk, they can do that. I can't possibly do that. I can give speeches
because I've had something like thirty years of experience doing it, and I have techniques I use to make it easier, techniques I gained gradually from having to do public speaking for many years. I just make lots of jokes to get everyone laughing. Or I build and show off some electronic device to get people talking to me about it.
Or—and maybe you know this about me—I break the ice and make people laugh by pulling pranks on them. I could write a whole book on those pranks alone, that's for sure.
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I did a ton of pranks in junior high and high school. I got caught many times in junior high. The main thing I learned was that if you told a few others about a prank, the word spread and you got caught quickly. In high school I was careful in this regard. I made sure to keep my pranks quiet.
Once, for the benefit of everyone in my twelfth-grade driver's education class, I built an electronic siren—it sounded just like a real police siren—that I could start and stop, holding it under my chair in the dark during the movie that played as we drove in our simulators. I wanted to see if anyone braked and pulled over. I'd make it with tons of batteries so it would last a month or more and place it on top of the TVs that were in every classroom. (The TVs were up high, supported from and attached to the ceiling, so the teachers couldn't see my sirens.) The teachers would think the TV had a problem. It's hard to isolate where a very high pitch is coming from; I'd read that somewhere.
But later in the twelfth grade, I got caught again. Big-time.
I got the idea to build a little electronic metronome—you know, the thing that goes tick, tick, tick, to keep time when people take piano lessons. I built it, heard the ticking, and thought: Hey, this kind of sounds like a bomb. So I took some batteries, took the labels off the batteries so they looked like plain metal canisters, and I taped them together. And then I wrote in big letters on it: contact explosive.
I thought: Oh, this will be funny. I'll stick it in Bill Werner's locker. I just happened to know his locker code. Bill's locker was near mine so I put my so-called