Being Creative – Friends by xpect

There was no better way to impress your friends in the late 80′s and early 90′s, than to show the capabilities of your Commodore Amiga. Yeah, show them Defender of the Crown. Yeah, show them Space Ace. Yeah, show them Depeche Mode music made on Soundtracker. Yeah, show them a HAM picture. Everyone was sold and I felt like the Ruler Of The Universe. Well, at least the Ruler Of Everything Cool. ;-)

When I bought my Amiga I was really the first to have one in my small city of 15000 people (yeah it’s a city there), and started the process that all my friends and/or colleagues would want one and later annoy their parents to buy them one.
For me that was great, because it meant, in the end, that I would have much more sources for sharing info, games and ultimately fun from our systems. How wrong I would be. It seemed that all the people I knew that had Amigas at the time didn’t know a shit about computers and invalidated all the disks, corrupted them, threw them in all kinds of beverages and expected them to work flawlessly with all that abuse. I don’t remember how MANY times I’ve told them to not unprotect the disks, I even put tape on the disks for them, so that they couldn’t close the writing protection tab. To no avail.

For me it was unbelievable that my generation at the time could not do nothing more productive then playing games all day long, and then having the capability to corrupt all their disks.

Of course I had disks that always worked, of course they would ask me over and over again to copy a working version of the game for them. After the third time they asked me the same thing, I would only say: “F*** off, you’re a moron and you don’t even deserve to touch a machine like that!” That’s the only way they would understand. Slapping them on their ego, reinforcing their stupidity regarding things tech.

No wait! I’M THE MORON!!!!! I then had the idea: Make them pay for the service!! Say that their disks are unusable. Buy new disks, make a copy of the copy of the game to be copied, so you won’t destroy your ‘original’ disk. ;) Go to their houses. Use their computer for the wear and tear. Charge the price for the original blank disk that I copied the copy of the copy of my ‘original’ copy. Charge them the disk of the copy of the copy of my ‘original’ disk, to be copied to. Charge them the service. Use everything in their houses. Meet their sisters, have a nice snack that their mum’s made for us. Oh boy great business!

I didn’t charge anything that they weren’t capable of paying from their allowances but with this kind of service alone I bought my Epson LX-800 printer in four or five months. 8-pin dot matrix awesomeness!

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