Weird Al

The boy didn’t have a lot going for him. At least, that’s what his parents thought.

His parents were concerned. The other children would not stop laughing at their son. The other kids had turned him into a joke.

His name was Al. And there was something definitely different about the child. Foremostly, his speech. He didn’t speak until age 3. Not a word. Which means he never used any of the obligatory babytalk words like, “dada,” “mam,” “bye-bye,” and “poop.”

The doctors said it was a developmental delay. The long gaps between his verbal responses. Speaking only in fragments. Al didn’t start using complete sentences until age 4.

When his folks put him in school, it was hard going. The other kids teased him, incessantly giggling at him, whispering. He was bullied. Degraded. His teachers couldn’t connect with him. He was frustrated. He once threw a chair at his tutor.

The school was perpetually sending letters home, mostly about his behavior. He was a daydreamer, socially weird, he hated authority. One teacher’s note said: “he will never get anywhere.” Another teacher said he was “mentally slow.”

The final straw was when a teacher’s note said the school was unable to teach this. So his exasperated mother purchased several books and tried teaching him at home.

Eventually, he found his way back to school, but he wasn’t your model student. And nothing had changed.

He still got crummy grades in geography, history, and languages. He still had a hard time making friends. Still disliked teachers, and all forms of authority. The kids still laughed.

By his teenage years, it was all he could take. He would inevitably leave school to join the prestigious ranks of us High-School Dropouts. (We were happy to have him as a club member.)

But Al’s truancy didn’t last long. He decided to enroll in a technical school. But, he flunked the entrance exam. So he went back to high school. This time he finished. Although God knows how, he loved cutting class.

By 22, Al hit the bottom. His parents were impoverished. His dad had gone broke. Times were hard, and Al was sort of floundering. Al wrote a letter to his sister. “I am nothing but a burden to my family. Really, it would have been better if I had never been born.”

What the kid needed was confidence. What he needed was self-esteem. What he needed was a job.

He looked for a job for nearly a year. Nothing seemed to fit. He was out of place, like a fish trying to climb a tree. He finally got an interview at the federal patent office. But the interview was uncomfortable. Namely, because Al was socially awkward.

Even so, as he sat across the desk from the supervisor, exhibiting all the signs of a young man who had been teased for most of his life, the interviewer realized this was no loser. This was a boy who needed someone to believe in him.

The supervisor decided to give him a shot. They gave him a probationary position. Temp work. It took a year of drifting before Al finally found a permanent position as a clerk.

But it worked. After only a year, the kid had a newfound confidence. And—who’d’ve thunk it?—he was GOOD at his job. In fact, it turned out, Al was brilliant.

Four years later, at age 26, in 1905 Albert Einstein published the theory of relativity. And nobody was laughing anymore.