I was in the hospital at 13, 7 hours from home, and lonely. They had a councilor there who took pity on me and agreed to let me use her computer to check my email. Only provision was that I couldn't install anything, and couldn't change any settings.

She stood behind me and watched bemused as I fired up telnet, connected to my ISP's pop server and started reading emails from friends. I think I did manage to send some emails back via SMTP but I was not as good with that protocol.

If you could bottle the creativity and enthusiasm of a bored teen, I'm pretty sure you could take over the world