The hacker thing has gotten a little out of control. Although I now know who he is, I'm still trying to protect the kid who turned him in, and so I've waited for some other source to come forward. It's been made clear to me that the kid is, indeed, nuts. We looked up his picture and Colleague said with some surprise: "He's so little! He's just a little, harmless looking, dorky kid!" I asked her if she had expected to see the captain of the football team instead. Trust me, he fits the hacker profile by about 100%.
It ends tomorrow. My intention is to find him and sit with him in one of the assistant principal's office while I share with him the following. I'll tell him that the a.p. is there for his protection. Let him figure out what that means. I need him there as a witness. (Although I also understand that his parents are likely to be supportive of me, and of any disciplinary action. But no one expects the kid to take it well.)
I wrote it as a letter because I wanted to get it all out of my head and on paper. But I won't just hand it to him; it'll be more like a conversation. A relatively one-sided conversation. Then, I don't know. For all I know, he won't even be in school tomorrow.
But when I'm done, I hope someone drops on him good and hard.
Here it is:
To ----:
Let's start by saying that both of us know what has happened. There is no point in starting anywhere else. I'm not into games, and starting with anything but the truth is only going to be annoying for everyone involved.
I'm not sure why you were interested in doing what you did. Once, perhaps, and then coming to tell me about it would have been different. When you did it for the second time, it went beyond that, and it went to the place where it's serious, for many reasons.
Don't bother telling me that you didn't really hurt anything. I saw what you did and I know that the changes you made to the homepage weren't serious. I also know that you did more than that, but I'm not going there, either.
You did hurt something, just by breaking in and staying there. You hurt yourself and you hurt me.
You hurt yourself because you never considered that your actions might have consequences. Simply, this was not smart. It doesn't matter how smart you are, or how good you are with computers. People who cannot project the outcome of their actions are not smart. This is simply part of the basic definition of intelligence. Intelligent people see ahead and predict outcomes. You will probably not be happy with the outcome of this action of yours.
You also hurt me personally. I don't know if this was something you meant to do or not. That doesn't even matter. You don't even know me, and yet you hurt me personally.
So we are going to get to know each other. I would like to know how it feels when you do something like this. In what way it makes you happy.
I would like you to tell me about something you like to do.
About a place you like to be.
About someone you admire or respect, and why.
I would like to tell you about me, too.
I watched my mother die for 8 years, and then one day, less than a year later, my father died,. I want to tell you some about who he was and what he was like.
I think you should know that twelve years ago I had a brain tumor and what that was like and that's why I'm deaf. That's why when you tell me your last name to look up your network password, it always sounds like something else to me.
My point is not to make you feel sorry for me, or to make you feel as if I've had a terrible life and now you just made it worse. My life is fine. Mostly, my life is fine because I've never had to need to feel ashamed of who I am. I'm not Mother Teresa and I'm not Bill Gates and I'm not Madonna. (But you could see that.) I'm just someone. It doesn't matter who I am. It does matter that I am.
It matter that you are, too. If I didn't care about you, I would have just given your name to the principal and walked away. She would have given you the punishment that's listed in the handbook. So you would have been punished. Big deal.
It's more important to me that you know what you did, and that there isn't anything you can do in this world that stands alone and doesn't have consequences or connections to something or someone else. And if you can't ever get that, by the way, it's pretty likely that whenever you do go ahead and do something unethical or illegal or even immoral, you're going to get caught, because you didn't have the intelligence to know how not to get caught.
That's why I wanted to talk to you now, and maybe, to stop this kind of thing now. Not because you hurt me, or did something against school rules, or even because you broke the law. I wanted to try and help you see that you hurt you, so maybe you wouldn't do it again.
I want to know how you feel now. I want to know if you still think it was okay to do this. I want to know if you are aware that there are school policies about this, and if you think they apply to you. If so, or even if not, I want to know what you think should happen next.
Your turn.
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I'm watching Friends
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