I first started using computers at a very young age. I was probably 4 or 5, thereabouts. I played Oregon Trail on a very young Windows system. Since then, I have become familiar with most recent versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and recently, Ubuntu Linux. My laptop is currently running Ubuntu, and I use it daily to listen to music, browse the internet, and of course, work on school work.
My father is a Computer Scientist, so I suppose all my time spent with him has at least partially led me to choose this as my field of study, but other factors are definitely in play. When I was still 12-13, one of my good friends was making decent ($600 per project) money making simple web applications as a freelancer - I tried to get into the business, because it looked like so much fun, but was never successful. It's essentially become a kind of unrequited wish for me.
On a daily basis, all the Computer Scientists I know do pretty much whatever they please! Pick up their children from soccer games, go to lunch, work on a grant letter. I suppose my acquaintance with CS people is primarily in academia, but I would hope that any career I choose would have similar flexibility!
I can't reasonably say that I've had a bad programming experience, because each experience did teach me something overall. Obviously the hours I spent this summer hunting for unclosed parentheses and bad syntax in the Ruby on Rails code I was writing were fairly frustrating, but I'll attribute that to a lack of strong text editors for the language. My good programming experiences and assignments were probably too numerous to count, as I generally enjoy writing code and thinking about problems. Again though, I'll cite my time writing Rails code this summer. I was essentially a freelancer for a local medical recruiting company, so I was able to spend my time as I pleased, and work the hours I wanted too. Moreover, every time I made a change to my Rails code and hit the refresh button my browser to find it working, I was thoroughly excited.
After my undergraduate education I would like to move into industry for a few years, just to understand how things work, and get some real life experience - as well as stay away from school for a few years! Eventually though, I think I plan to come back into academia and find myself a position where I can pick up kids from soccer games, eat lunch, and work on grant proposals.