My Tech Journey: From Childhood Curiosity to Lifelong Passion

From childhood, I had the opportunity of being exposed to technology, both mobile devices and Desktops (Laptops included). My father has always been an engineer and is still one, but back in the days, he usually collected people's desktop and help them service it. So there have always been a lot of desktop computers in my house. You remember the old type of desktop computers that looks like a televsion with a huge backside.

I had always watched my dad repair this computers and operate them as a kid. I and my siblings watch my dad; we learn from him even though he was not intentionally teaching us how to use it but as far as we were there watching him, we were learning. What even made it super easy for us in knowing how to use a computer or desktop was the fact that my father got one at home. So it made us more exposed to the technology of using the computer. We were not even just limited to having a desktop at home; my dad also got himself a laptop and we used it everyday.

Write from a young age; one of my favourite games on the laptop was chess and marvis beacon. I would always play chess with my dad or with the computer. That was how I learned the movements of all the pieces of chess. At some point, chess became my favourite game and I grew to love it and was at some point an addicted chess player. For Mavis Beacon, I played it so much that I had already attained the speed of 50 words per minute typing at the age of 11 years old. Right then, I had the goal of having a speed of 120 words per minute. Even though I have not achieved it yet, I am quite close to that speed at of the minute.

Talking about mobile phones, they were tiny pieces of technology that facinated me. I loved it so much and played games with it a lot on my dad's phone. Most of the games I can remember myself playing back then were Assassin Creed, Ben 10, Spiderman, Bounce, Pro Evolution Soccer, and FIFA. I played games a lot, and what I always did was monitor where my dad kept his phone before he went to bed.

Luckily for me, my dad likes leaving his phone in the living room to charge overnight while he goes to sleep in his room with my mum. That was always the great moment for me to get up, take his phone to download new games, and play them overnight until I am too tired and very sleepy. The sweetest things about all these is that, there is always power when I am using the device, so when the day breaks, my dad comes back to his phone fully charged. As a wise kid, I know I am not to let the phone not fully charged when he wakes in the morning or there will be suspicion.

So whenever I use the phone to play games, I make sure I use it plugged in, and if they take away the power in the process, then I may just use it for a few minutes and leave it right where he dropped it before going back to bed.

I loved phones so much that I had to get myself one at the age of 11 years old. My parents did not buy me my first phone; instead, I bought it myself. They were very surprised and asked themselves, Where did this kid see money to get himself a phone? Questions were arising in their minds: did he steal money to get it? Did he steal the phone? Who gave him the phone? How could he get himself a phone?

I was so passionate to have one for myself. I loved the piece of technology and was good at using it to the extent that I was helping my parents, friends and families with issues concerning setting things up with their phone. I was not the only one like that; even my elder brother had the same tech trait as I did. We both shared that thing in common.

My parents called me down and asked me to get to know how I was able to myself a device at my young age. They figured that I denied myself food for 4 to 5 months when I go to school by saving every penny I was given to use to eat at school. Imagine being given 50 naira every day from Monday to Friday. And being able to save up to 6,000 naira to buy a phone from those every day 50 naira savings. If you do the calculations, you will be able to calculate the number of days I had to stay hungry in school but not of that mattered more than the goal of getting myself a device.

It did not end there; I kept getting myself more devices. I kept changing my phone every 3 to 4 months. I had gotten so used to starving myself and not eating in school. I can't really remember the name of the device I first bought, but I remember getting the Nokia 5300, the Nokia 2470, the Nokia N95, the Nokia E75, the Nokia C2, the Nokia X2, the Nokia XpressMusic, the Nokia N86, the Nokia C1, and the Nokia 2700. I used more than the number of devices mentioned here and I got them myself as a kid out of saving from my food money.

What I used to do was that I would use the phone for 3 to 4 months and then go back to the market and swap it to another device of my choice. This gave me a reason to constantly save my money and change phones periodically. At school everyone was seeing me as a rich kid thinking my parents were getting me all those phones not knowing how much I had to suffer to get what I want.

Now, I am still someone who is very much in love with gadgets, although I don't change phone every now and then again. I have been using the same set of devices of the past 3 years and I have not changed my phone since then. Talking about laptops, I use my PC every day, and it has become something I cannot do without now. I would have loved to talk more about my experience with my laptops but this post is already way too long. Hopefully I may get to share that someday in another post.

Thank you for reading.