When I discovered video games at the arcade. So, I guess around 14.

That’s when I also discovered that nickles could be hammered into quarter-size slugs. There were three of us doing it. We’d use the nickles to buy tokens from the machine during happy hour at six for a dollar (20 cents worth of slugs), then sell them back to kids during regular hours at a quarter a piece. The kids would buy them because there was usually a line at the machine after school, so they didn’t need to wait in line if they bought them from us. That’s how we funded our addiction. I don’t remember how long we did this, probably only a summer.

My first wage-slave job was cleaning cages at a pet store around that same time. I took over for my best friend’s sister for a few weeks when she went to some sort of summer camp. I hated it very much. I worked a little harder in school after that.