Plaid's real name is Matthew Edmond Fitzgerald (His mother has an obsession with Gordon Lightfoot and there's talk in the family that she may have been a groupie in the 70's.) but he goes by the name of Matt.
Matt was one of those guys in school that all the teachers liked, that the guys wanted to be like, and the girls wanted to date. He was good looking and personable. Everything came easy to him. He lettered in track, baseball, basketball (His mom wouldn't let him play football - she was afraid he would get hurt.) AND he made straight A's.
But the kids in the Math, Science, Chess, and Computer clubs didn't fall for Matt's charm. They proudly brandished their dexterity in the esoteric fields of math and computers over students like him. THEY were novitiates in the priesthood of computers and computer programming. Only THEY understood the strange language and concepts required to work with these mysterious machines.
Then one fateful day Matt wandered in to a meeting of the Computer Club. The club advisor, Mr. Melman, welcomed Matt as a way of making the Computer Club "cool". Maybe if Matt stayed other students would join. The students welcomed Matt so that they could enjoy watching him flounder as he tried to grasped the concepts that they themselves had struggled with.
As it happened, the subject that day was object-oriented programming. The students were thoroughly familiar with Loops, Structs, If .. Then statments but object-orientation was proving a bit troublesome. They were practically giddy with the prospect of watching Matt get totally lost.
But something strange happened. Matt took to the subject almost instinctively. He couldn't tell you an If statement from a Try/Catch block but he immediately grasped the concept of creating an object reference and then being able to access any of that object's properties.
Matt asked Mr. Melman, "I think it's great that you can create a student object and a teach object but teachers and students have things in common. Why couldn't you just create one general object and then let each specific object use the general object's properties?"
The students around Matt started snickering. Eileen even laughed out loud. They sat back to watch Mr. Melman ridicule Matt.
"That's RIGHT Matt! That's called 'inheritance' and it's a subject I usually don't cover for another few meetings. Very good!" You could almost hear the sound of the other student's jaws hitting their desks.
From that moment on Matt took to computer programming in general, and object-oriented programming specifically, like a duck takes to
water. That summer Matt interned at a local software development firm. In the fall he started college at the local state college where he majored in Computer Science. In the summers he would work for the firm where he interned putting to use what he learned in school.
When Matt graduated he started working full-time for the small firm and after a year was made a lead programmer. Matt was a tireless advocate for O-O principles and constantly preached the gospel of object-oriented programming, analysis, and design.
A year later the small firm somehow won a contract to provide a complete web-based customer service application for a multi-state financial services firm. Matt was put in charge of designing the system and functioning as the lead programmer. The project was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget due primarily to the O-O design Matt came up with and the O-O principles he insisted on during development.
The client was so pleased it gave the small firm a substantial bonus and awarded them several other contracts they were considering. The firm's reputation grew so great that several other multi-state firms and two international companies awarded their business to the small firm.
The owner of the now much larger firm were so pleased that they made Matt a partner and promoted him to Chief Software Architect. During the party to celebrate Matt's promotion he met the owner's daughter. They started dating and eventually got married.
Today they live in a $500,000 house and drive expensive, luxury cars and have 2 beautiful children, a son, 6, and a daughter, 4. Today Matt was playing with the children when his daughter asked him, "Daddy, what's an 'interface'?".