My friends and I had only a few LAN parties that I can recall, at least ones that took place at any of our homes. There was, however, a PC repair shop in town t

My friends and I had only a few LAN parties that I can recall, at least ones that took place at any of our homes. There was, however, a PC repair shop in town that had a (pretty high-end for the time) LAN gaming room. I wanted to learn about computer repair, and so offered to work for them once a weekend or so, for a few hours, in exchange for learning about computer repair and free gaming for my friends and I. After raising an eyebrow, they agreed. In the end, I don’t think I really learned all that much. (The solution was often to just backup what we could of a person’s storage and reformat.) But my friends and I had a good time at this shop, run by two computer geeks of an older generation, that was probably just a few years shy of being wiped out by the Geek Squad and Genius Bar. Apart from that, my school district had a kind of magnet career skills center that offered a network administration course. On Fridays the instructor would let all of us in class play Counterstrike on the classroom’s LAN. I think that was put a stop to, however, after a district supervisor came into the room just as a student gleefully yelled, “Headshot!”