I was cleaning up just now and I found one of those Forrest Mims Radio Shack notebooks from back in the day and I remembered my first electronics project was from one of them.

My mom took me to an electronics shop where a mean old man who owned the place didn't want to help me

But he did help -- sort of. He begrudgingly found the parts for the project in his many bins of stuff.

I took it all home and put it together, and it didn't work at all and I was pretty bummed out

I decided to look at that project in the little notebook right now and I see that jerk old man gave me all kinds of wrong parts! No wonder my project didn't work.

What a jerk!