YOU COULD DIE ANYTIME My mother always wanted me to be a doctor. Technically, she said, "Doctor, lawyer, engineer," the mantra of all immigrant parents. But I knew that the only people who ever said that were lawyers and engineers. Unfortunately for my parents' ambitions, in 1978 my father bought a TRS-80 personal computer for his office. I immediately commandeered it as a personal toy and learning environment, and I became fascinated with its ability to create something out of nothing. Besides, it was an upgrade from my Atari 2600 as a gaming system. The day I was supposed to register for the local university, I was on a golf course when a vice principal from my high school saw me on the second green and yelled through his car window. "Hey, why aren't you at the university?" I had completely forgotten that it was time to continue my education. Running to the parking lot, I started to consider what program I would enroll in. I had received a tuition scholarship that summer, and my parents were lobbying for a sciences degree (i.e., premed). When, a few weeks earlier, my father had asked me what I planned to do, I'd said, "I can't do sciences, Dad. What if I don't get into med school? That degree is useless." It wasn't a well-thought-out statement-my father had a PhD in molecular physics. Grimacing, he called my mother over, and she started in on me. "Son of mine, you're so smart, you can be anything. You'll have no trouble getting into medical school. And for the rest of your life, you'll be called 'doctor.' Look at your father; he gets so much respect because he has a doctorate in physics. You'll be set for life financially." I was dubious. Medicine didn't seem like fun, and I really didn't want to spend ten years getting a PhD. "Okay, let's compromise," I said. "First-year engineering has organic chemistry as a requirement. I'll take the sciences version, and it'll make it easier for me to transfer into a premed program later if I change my mind." Mom saw this as a victory, but I could see from my father's reaction that he knew I wasn't going to change my mind. On the drive over to the University of New Brunswick's registration center, I decided to take electrical engineering. Other than the compromise with my mother, my logic in choosing engineering was that I was pretty good with the new personal computers, but I thought I should take something harder for me than computer science if I wanted a real career. Computers were novel and fun, but there didn't seem to be much of a future in something that could only play games and replace typewriters. Engineering suited me. I was perpetually near the top of my class, and I was able to use my talent for computers to accelerate my performance with snazzy-looking lab papers and I got an A plus in every programming course I could take as an elective. In a microprocessor design course in third year, we had to form teams to build a rudimentary computer and operating system. My partner was Peter, and he was Czechoslovakian by birth but had been raised in Canada. His hardware expertise complemented my software skills nicely, and I didn't even mind his '70s porn-star mustache. I proposed to Peter that we should take a cue from personal computers and design a two-dimensional, full-screen user interface for the rudimentary test-board computer we were building. "Just use the command line that everyone else uses, and help me with the hardware," he protested. I knew I would wreck the project if I was responsible for wrapping wires and placing chips, so I said, "Look, the full-screen interface will let us put more lines of code on the screen when we're doing demos, plus it'll look impressive as hell. Come ooonnnnn." My pleading worked, and the project was successful beyond our expectations. The full-screen interface wowed our professor, and we got the highest grade in the class along with a reputation for creativity among our classmates. By the following semester, full-screen interfaces became the minimum standard for all project teams. I was learning that glitz was as important as function when it came to doing well-even in an academic environment. Later that year, Peter and I won a major engineering design competition. We programmed our custom microprocessor to do speech recognition, and in a fit of brilliance, Peter suggested, "I know all we can do right now is turn a light bulb on and off, but why don't we tell people that the application is designed to control a wheelchair or something?" We had a friend draw some pictures of happy invalids zipping around on automated wheelchairs using voice commands, and our humanitarianism won us a scholarship, a trophy from Nortel Networks, and a trip to the nationals competition in Montreal. --- While I was in university, I had enrolled in private pilot lessons. I once had the dream of becoming a fighter pilot, but I was stymied by imperfect vision and a lack of conflict in Canadian airspace. I had my license by the time we had to fly to Montreal for the engineering competition, and on a cold Sunday morning, Peter and I loaded our circuit board into the back of a Cherokee Warrior for the two-hour trip. Having been taught on Cessnas, I hadn't flown this model of plane before, and it made Peter a bit nervous. I comforted him, saying, "Don't worry, these single-engine planes all fly the same. What could go wrong?" Other than a lot of cursing while trying to prime the engine to start, the takeoff and trip to Dorval Airport were uneventful; I was pretty good at maintaining altitude and following a map. I even let Peter take the controls so I could take a quick nap, earning a, "This is fun, but um, you know I don't know how to fly this thing, right?" I showed him the autopilot button and nodded off. An hour later we were approaching Dorval, and I had air traffic control on the radio assigning me runway twenty-four for approach from the south. It was an easy approach, and I lowered the flaps to reduce speed while Peter said, "This was great! You should fly us everywhere!" As we entered final approach at two thousand feet, the plane's engine sputtered a few times and then shut down completely. Peter asked me, "Are you supposed to turn the engine off on approach?" I assured him that it was normal procedure while I frantically scanned the dashboard to see what was wrong. There were a series of lights on, some flashing, but it wasn't apparent what the actual problem was. The number-one cause of flight crashes in private planes is lack of fuel, but glancing at the fuel gauge, I saw it was full. Just then, there was a burst of static from my headphones and an angry French voice telling me, "Echo Victor Romeo, you are approaching zee wrong runway!" I looked up and saw a large twenty-four on the runway and replied, "Negative, we're approaching runway twenty-four." He called me something unflattering that I couldn't understand and then said, "You are on twenty-four Right. You were assigned twenty-four Left!" What the? Parallel runways? I was about to land in mud five hundred feet short of either one, so I turned back to the dashboard and ignored the control tower's continued stream of invective, breaking out into a sweat. Wait a second. Did I see a full fuel tank? After a two-hour flight? Going back to the fuel gauge, I saw a second dial at zero, and it was also labeled fuel. There was a knob underneath labeled "L" and "R." Swearing under my breath, I snapped the switch from L to R, pumped the primer, and restarted the engine on the secondary fuel tank, something I hadn't had to deal with on Cessnas. Out loud, I said to Peter, "Oh, looks like I misjudged it. Better turn the engine back on," while I turned and smiled at him. By then he could see the too-close, rapidly ascending shadow of a rerouted 737 above and behind us, and he knew that something was wrong. I landed safely, taxied to our assigned parking spot, and pretended nothing unusual had happened. As I dealt with a security guard who came running up to the plane, Peter unloaded the circuit board, and we shortly got into a rental car for the drive to McGill. Peter seemed pensive, which I thought was strange. We'd landed safely, and things were going well. When we got to the university, we went directly to the design showroom, plugged in our equipment, and did a quick test to make sure everything worked. Peter looked like he was going to be sick. When I said, "Turn on," and the light came on, he suddenly started to laugh. I stared at him, and he said, "Oh my god, I was so nervous. I dropped the circuit board when I was taking it out of the plane. I thought I'd broken it and you were going to kill me when you found out." So he was worried that I was going to metaphorically kill him, when unknown to him, we had both just escaped actual death at my hands. I never said anything to him about the botched landing. Shortly after returning to Fredericton, I received a letter in the mail stating that I was no longer allowed to fly into Dorval Airport. --- Throughout university I was perpetually near the top of my class, with academic...
