Boy Wonder
James Gniteki

Mike turned 13 last January. He has been home schooled for the last two school years by his Mom, because he found conventional school somewhat boring, and found his class peers rather immature. He is taking an ambitious curriculum, including Grade 9 Algebra. He reads several books every week. When he took the week-long battery of Iowa standard scholastic tests last summer, he scored in the top 1/2 of 1% nationwide.

His idea of play, when he's not riding his high tech titanium racing bicycle, is to spend several hours a day on the Web, much of it in technical and sci-fi chat rooms. He normally has up to 70 chat rooms active simultaneously, and designs and scripts his own 'bots which automatically defend his and his friends' sites against unauthorized takeover attempts. He is an official chat room host on many servers, and is highly competent in that role. Most of the people he communicates with on the Web assume he is in his high twenties or going on 30 years old, until he corrects them.

He volunteers several hours per week at the local library. There, he maintains and troubleshoots the 28 computer terminals which link to the Web and to other library system computers. He handles most of the technical interaction with the IS group "downtown", and does most of the training, and also handles library customer computer assistance because this library staff feel he does it all better than they can. His personal library card also routinely shows 30+ books out, and he monitors their due dates via the Web, of course.

Recently, he talked for several hours, via the Web and telephone, with various senior executives at Paramount (including a direct report to Rick Berman), who are responsible for the Star Trek: Next Generation, and Voyager television series. They were very impressed with his enthusiasm, knowledge, and maturity, and were all set to accommodate his intense desire to become an official Paramount site host, UNTIL the corporate lawyers were consulted. The lawyers said "no" because Mike is underage, even though he would have merely been a volunteer, like at the library, not an employee.

Do you think maybe Paramount missed an opportunity here? Do you think maybe a future "employer" is going to find the process of managing Mike a bit of a creative undertaking?