Some of you guys already know, besides having a full-time office job, i also have a part time data entry job at home for a website listing tech-related companies. For this data entry job, i'm given lists of companies for me to find their websites, and then fill in the companies' details.
The job might not be much (and boring to most), but i was just having it as a source of side income since i had quite some free time to spend. Little did i know, i would learn so much from it. So much about the real world out there.
Such as when i find out how a company started out small, and went on to 'phagocytose' (acquire) every other companies around them.
And how for every company that succeeded, many more went bust, were bought over, taken over, and could only imagine the despair brought upon all their employees.
How an idea from a creative mind, coupled with courage to take great risks, brought about the rise of many a company.
Sometimes i learned about a new technology i never knew, and how everything around us now depended on technology so much.
I learned that India is much more technologically advanced than i thought, and perhaps have the greatest minds in the world.
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Sort of opened my eyes to the world out there, instead of just seeing what's around me. Made me finally realise how vast and complicated the world really is.
Even just listing down the technology companies, i came across vast differences in the people that worked behind them, from education level to working life experiences. One can see it just by looking at their websites alone.
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And every once in a while, i came across something that stirred inside me.
I was supposed to be finding information about a games company, Acclaim. From its wiki page, somehow i ended up reading on Sierra On-Line.
And then i remembered a game released by Sierra, that me and my brothers used to play on the oldest of our computers, back when we were still in primary school even.
Lode Runner.
We played this one game for days, weeks on end. I remembered how we would go to Holiday Plaza, bringing a few floppy disks. Look through a catalogue of PC games, and decide which one to be copied into those few floppy disks. And then back home happily, with new games to spend our days in front of the computer.
This was one such game copied into our floppy disks, that changed our small worlds of video games and cartoons back then.
How we spend so much time over this game, trying to solve its puzzles. Playing cooperatively to beat its levels. Creating our own puzzles to play with.
The last level i ever remember playing was one created by my older brother, where the whole screen was filled with bombs. Haha.. we had so much fun playing it over and over and over again. Even though essentially, the whole screen is going to get blown up and we'll just die over and over again. We laughed when we tried to kill off each other. We laughed when we couldn't outrun the ticking bombs. We laughed when there's nothing left on the screen.
So much laughter.. over something which seems so insignificant now.
Sigh.
Growing up sucks, don't it.
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ps - for those of you who wants to relive these childhood memories (if you played Lode Runner before), the original lead programmer had kindly put up this very game for download on his website. Bless his kind soul :P. Now excuse me while i have some lode running to do .. (:
