I’m a ’74 model. I graduated from school in the East in 1990. Tenth grade. I didn't think I absolutely had to go on and take the big end-of-school exams; I wanted to earn money instead, quite honestly.

First off, my mother found me a kind of environmental job, in water resources management. I'm sure it would have been interesting, but you had to be the right person. Greenpeace or something. I'm more cut out for the market economy, in contrast to my mother who's more of an environment-friendly person — the kind that wants to make the world a better place, as far as her political stance goes. She had read Marx and Lenin and stuff back then, but no matter, she always made up her own mind, I would say.

I played a lot of sports as a child. First swimming and canoeing, then six years of soccer; I really wanted to work with children, to be a trainer or something like that. But for that I needed a high-school diploma and a college degree in sports. I was pretty fed up with school; I get distracted pretty easily and there's a lot I can't follow. I have to learn everything by myself at home. And since I don't work very hard in this respect, it would've been pretty difficult to get through it anyway.

Actually, I was originally supposed to take the end-of-school exams. When I got to the meeting where we were to learn who was going to be allowed to take the exams and who wasn't, it turned out that everyone who'd been selected had a place reserved for them as “apprentice with high-school diploma” — apart from me. For a moment I was pretty shocked. “Why me?” But then I quickly got over it. As soon as I left the meeting I was kind of happy, — at least no longer sad. And anyway, I had a girlfriend back then and that also helped. So that's how I glossed over the entire problem.