My mom was a schoolteacher. I was in fifth or sixth grade, so after school I'd walk from my school to hers to wait to get driven home. Her school had an Apple I

My mom was a schoolteacher. I was in fifth or sixth grade, so after school I'd walk from my school to hers to wait to get driven home. Her school had an Apple II, and I'd tinker away on it. One day, another teacher asked me what I was doing. I explained I was making a game using the random number generator. He asked what happened if the game produced the same number twice. I said that's OK because the RNG is more like dice than picking a card from a shuffled deck -- it has no memory of past numbers. His follow-up questions were strange, and I gradually realized that he must think dice actually do have memory; otherwise, how could you have "streaks" and "dry spells" and all the other superstition around casino gambling and betting? This was around the time I figured out that there are some folks who get certain concepts, and others who don't. I happened to get the ones that made programming easier.