(is it just me or does the title of this post make it sound like I’m going to expose something really scandalous about myself?)

Eszter tagged me so here are five things that you may not have known about me (well, five things that aren’t apparently obvious about me):

  1. I was born in Kuwait and lived there until I was ten. In the summer of 1990, my family was visiting my brother who was attending SIUE at the time. A few weeks into our visit, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Since my parents were Palestinian expats living in Kuwait, we couldn’t go back. How’s that for a summer vacation?
  2. In college, I worked at a small local ISP, doing tech support and eventually doing a lot of web design. Much of my job was helping people setup their dialup Internet connections and email accounts. Tech support can be pretty stressful but it was a great job for a geeky college student. I learned a lot and I have a lot of great stories from that experience. My favorite story was when a furious woman called accusing us of having done something to her PC because she got the non system disk error that you get if you forget a floppy in your PC and then try to boot it up (the PC starts looking for the OS on the floppy). She had no idea what a floppy drive was so I had to visually describe to her what it might look like and how to remove the floppy from it.
  3. In high school, I wanted to be a pathologist, just so I could be like Scully.
  4. The summer before college, I got free web server space at SIUE so I started messing around with building websites. I first started with MS Publisher, then FrontPage Express, then FrontPage (98?), and finally Dreamweaver (version 3!!!). Along the way, I taught myself HTML and ASP. It’s fun to go back and look at my seriously bad personal home page designs and very MySpace-ish blog templates.
  5. I lived at home during college and only moved out when I went to Michigan. Most people seem shocked when I say that.

Five people I’m tagging - Srah, Cari, Jude & Serene (they only count as one blog!), apete, one of the Amys, and anyone else who wants to do it . . .