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[mindmetoo]

[mindmetoo]

In Toronto, I used to work with this mid-30s guy at a tax software company. He was the network guy. Let me call him Attila. Attila The Network Guy. He was your typical techie. A boy in a man's body. He liked his beer, his hunting rifles, his Doom game. He liked 19-year-old women. In his 20s he had that cute, frat boy look about him which clung to him unnaturally into his early 30s. If you're 30something and boyish and youthful it's not out of the realm of possibilities, as I've discovered, to date women in the 19-21 year old range. In fact, it's nigh impossible to date women your own age if you don't look your age and sometimes the only women who will date you are 21-year-old women who judge you to be 25. Physically you look younger so it doesn't look like Miss Nineteen is out with her father on a date. But you have money, your own place, knowledge, and more patience than a 19-year-old male. You're different in positive ways and you have a certain appeal.

At some point we changed over from Netware to NT Server and this seemed to make Attila The Network Guy age rapidly and become bitter. He started drinking more beer and put on weight. He stopped washing his hair and brushing his teeth and replacing his worn clothing. His teeth started to turn a shade of green. Knowing we had changed from Novell to Microsoft on the back end kept me from thinking this personality shift was the result of brain tumor.

Anyway, when you're 36 and you have green teeth and your fashionable frat clothes start sporting noticeable holes and frays, it becomes increasingly hard to date 19-year-olds.

Attila The Network Guy was of British descent but had lived in Toronto much of his life. Your WASP types seem to take the most offense at Toronto's transformation from a WASP enclave to the world's most multicultural city. Attila The Network Guy was also a fervent anti-Communist. After the fall of the Berlin Wall Toronto experienced a large migration of Eastern Europeans. Many Slavic immigrants found a niche in the hardware business in Toronto. Attila The Network Guy started having to deal with Poles, Czechs, and Russians. He would always bitterly complain to me about them chattering away in their little Slavic languages behind his back when he had to buy hardware from him. He was one of those who long hung onto the theory that German reunification, free elections in Poland, the break up of the Soviet Union, and the removal of American and Soviet nuclear weapons from Europe was all part of some crafty Soviet Communist plot and just you wait. They'll be back. So, all in all, Attila The Network Guy had no love for their culture and he didn't mind telling you about it.

And then a strange thing happened. Actually two strange things. One, he started becoming very buddy buddy with Igor, a Russian developer we had hired. Two, he announced he was going on a holiday to Russia, in February. It was all made more mysterious because every day the newspaper had headlines about a record cold hitting Moscow and how 10 people were dying every day. It seemed, at first, an innocent mystery. Why would a guy who hates Russians so much travel to Moscow for a two week holiday in the dead of winter in the middle of a record cold? The only person who could answer that was Igor.

"Igor, why is Attila The Network Guy going to Moscow on holiday?"

"I CAN'T SAY!" Igor responded in that tone of voice that said "I have a BIG secret and I really can't tell you but from the tone of my voice that should provide a big hint."

Then it clicked. "JESUS CHRIST, IGOR, HE'S GOING THERE FOR A MAIL ORDER BRIDE ISN'T HE?"

"I CAN'T SAY!" repeated Igor in that tone of voice that said "Bingo, got it in one!"

Sure enough, Attila The Network Guy was going there to marry his mail order bride, a woman he ordered off of some web site. This got me thinking a lot about mail order brides. On principle the idea is reprehensible. A love meant to last a life time should have a great back story. How can your child look to his mother and say "Mommy, how did you and daddy meet?" and the mother of your child has to answer "well, daddy was very lonely and drunk one night but not drunk enough that he couldn't enter my order number and his credit card into a secure server page and get my mailing address..."

But then I read about all these horror stories of beautiful Russian women who marry old, foul smelling divorced guys who beat them and treat them like sex slaves. And I think to myself "If I could save one 6' tall, leggy, 19 year old blonde woman from marrying an abusive drunk by marrying her myself, wouldn't I have to marry her? For the sake of humanity?" Why, it would practically be my Christian duty if you thought about it in those terms. Right?

Anyway, Attila The Network Guy married his bride and had her in Canada by fall. It cost him something on the order of $10,000 when all was said and done. Canada has some pretty stringent rules to follow when marrying a mail order bride. This came about after some guy in Toronto years before basically got himself one and wholly abused her until she managed to escape and place herself in a shelter. One of the rules is you have to visit her in her home country at least twice. So there are travel expenses, legal expenses etc. ($10,000 / one $200 a night hooker per month = 4 years of assured sex.)

No one saw her until the company Christmas party. All we knew was she was a "teacher" in her little Russian peasant village. The company Christmas party was going to be her big unveiling. I couldn't wait. Wow, she was breathtaking. She was a couple inches taller than him, short blonde hair, green eyes, slender, about 22. She looked like she walked off a fashion show catwalk. But there something funny about her look. She spent the entire Christmas party making zero eye contact with anyone. And much like how an autistic baby's body doesn't conform to a mother's embrace, she seemed to keep a certain distance from her husband. Everything about her said "Two years, my landed immigrant status, and this guy is history."

Over the next year, Attila The Network Guy became a human ATM. There were trips to the USA to see her Russian friends who had married via the mail order bride route. She got a job at our company warehouse but that lasted 3 days. She quit. Then she got pregnant. Then Attila The Network Guy had to buy a new car and a house. Attila The Network Guy and I made the same salary, $50K a year, which might sound like a lot circa 1997 but in Toronto no single person could afford a house, a new car, a wife, and a child on that. Eventually I left that company and took the job with the dot.com and moved to Seattle. To this day I have no idea how the marriage turned out. Hrm.

[mindmetoo]

I used to work with the programmer named Stuart. Stuart was a very good programmer. Some programmers write code to get themselves from point a to point b. Stuart considered all possible ramifications. What could happen along the way? He would trap errors and write informative dialog boxes the Chartered Accountants who used our software could understand. Stuart and I got along well. I was a writer who was a closet programmer. Stuart was a programmer who was a closet writer.

One day Stuart was programming some new series of dialog boxes. As per usual, he was writing code to trap errors, crafting an appropriate error message for each possible permutation. He came upon one permutation that he realized could not happen in the real world or in a logical world. A kosher pig case. But it was still a permutation according to the code and it didn't sit right with Stuart that an error message didn't exist, even if that error message would not pop up in a billion years. Of course, what kind of error message can you create for an impossible situation?

Stuart decided on this:

"Lord love a duck!"

[mindmetoo]

For a while I seemed to get stuck with the job of counseling psychologist for the company receptionist Karlene. She would call me every night and talk for two hours about her inability to find True Love. I'm really that patient of a person. Part of her problem was she basically gave it up on the first date for any guy with a pulse. Worse, she started sleeping with her coworkers. When you're talking a company that's mostly men, mostly Unix developers who are lucky to have sex as often as George Lucas releases a Star Wars prequel, and word gets around the receptionist is the go-to girl, well, it can create an ugly environment.

I never actually told her she should stop being such a ho bag. I did tell her she should have some respect and demand some respect from the men in her life. You know, like, a guy should at least pay for a meal before she goes down on him in the back of a cab or does him in a convenient park on their walk from the office to the subway.

Anyway, she wasn't the most slender of women. And she would always rage about being fat and how this was keeping her from finding happiness. So we joined a gym together. I went 3 or 4 times a week and never stopped (until I moved to Korea of course). She went twice ever and gave up. "People look at me!"

One night she was like "No man will love me because I'm fat." Here I apply the donut shop principle. The lowest dregs of humanity, the most unattractive people on the planet, can be found in a donut shop. And many times they're there with their husband/wife and kids. Clearly, these dregs found love and sex and someone to even stick by their side.

So she says "No man will love me because I'm fat."

I apply the donut shop principle: "No matter your size, you will find someone who loves *you*."

Next day two women approached me at work.

"Did you call the receptionist fat last night on the phone?"

"Uh, what? uh?"

"Yeah, she says you called her fat. That seemed mean. If it was any other guy I would be thinking jerk! But I know you and I wanted to check."

*suddenly trying to recall the convo* "No. I did not call her fat... I said blah blah."

"Ah yes! That makes sense!"

What you have to understand in the software world, when females in the office are a tiny minority and they're not techies and they're surrounded by highly paid social misfits, they tend to have a circle the wagons mentality. Any perceived slight against one, no matter how crazy she is, is a slight against all of them and puts them at risk.

What saved me from being on the end of a pitchfork after the company's female staff all rose up as one was the day before I cleaned out the company fridge. You know how a fridge in a software office can get if no one cleans it out in like two years? Disgusting. After I cleaned it that sucker was spotless. The women of the office were damn impressed. "No one who can clean out a fridge would call a woman fat to her face."

[mindmetoo]

My first real job out of university was doing low level DTP stuff for an educational publishing company in the western reaches of Mississauga, which for you non-Canadians is a suburb of Toronto. It was so western Mississauga that it was almost Oakville. Oakville became a suburb of Mississauga when Mississauga transformed itself from being a mere bedroom community to what author Joel Garreau calls "edge cities". The idea behind an edge city is the suburb already has all the talent it needs. Why do people have to commute into a major city's downtown core when they could just drive a few blocks to the suburb's nominal downtown. While young people like to live and work in cities, people with kids just want to get home after work ASAP. Their quality of life isn't enhanced by having a great tapas bar on the top floor of your office tower. Offering them a job close to work would mean the ability to attract and retain talent and reduce all kinds of problems like lateness and the inefficiencies it causes. Of course every company, from the Royal Bank to IBM, jumps on this band wagon and pretty soon a sleepy middle classed suburb of white collar professionals becomes a city in its own right, along with traffic jams and an inevitable Ethiopian restaurant. (Garreau in his book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier advances the entirely correct theory that a city can't rightly be called a city until it can support at least one Ethiopian restaurant).

Anyway, the company "PJ Sprout & Associates", was located in a light industrial mall farm. These were all the rage in the early '90s. There was a recession on. Companies couldn't afford the rent in downtown Toronto. So they moved out to the North American equivalent of an offictel and paid 1/2 the rent.

The company name was a bit misleading as it was all PJ Sprout. There were no associates. The owner/president was the whole ball of wax. I'll credit him, at least, for arriving independently at what got Apple computers started. The trick is to look bigger than you are. Apple, despite working out of a small rented warehouse, made sure they looked huge at trade shows. Their booths were first class. Their brochures were glossy. The PC business was still a hobbyist thing and Apple really stuck out as something big and flashy and professional. This wasn't some fat guy in a plaid shirt selling a computer he hacked together with surplus Navy parts.

PJ Sprout was a 50something man. He was this hardcore Catholic with a severe drinking problem and penchant for collecting guns. Canadians, save for the nuttiest, aren't known as big gun collectors. His wife knew of his drinking problem and tried to get around it by making sure he didn't have enough pocket money. That's all well and good for your regular schleps but when you own a company and a bank gives you a credit line, there are ways of getting funds. He was endlessly going to the company comptroller and demanding she cut him a check. He would then cash the check at the local watering hold and come back sloshed.

Sometimes he'd start talking about, in one breath, his gun collection and his love for his family. He would grow increasingly loud and aggressive in his monologue, building to the inevitable climax where he proclaimed "God help any man, ANY MAN, who tries to harm MY family."

Sure anyone tries to harm my family and I got a gun lying around I'd have no compulsion against first shooting the guy in the stomach, letting him think a moment about life with a colostomy bag before plugging him between the eyes. But I don't really dwell on this, especially after a couple beers. You get a couple beers in me and I'll start talking about how neat teleportation booths would be. With PJ, however, you had a sense that he was just waiting for the day someone, GOD HELP THE MAN, tried to harm HIS family. Why own an elephant gun, in this day and age, if you can't observe its devastating effects on a guy trying to steal your hub caps? BLAMO!

PJ was also big into reading the latest management book working its way up the NY Times best seller list. Crap like Ten Minute Manager, Habits of Highly Effective People, Calming the Paper Tiger etc. always littered his desk. If the guy is still alive today and not senile, he probably spunks it to Who Moved My Cheese.

PJ, coked up on his own sense of self importance, had our graphic artist create a little poster featuring what PJ claimed was the most earth shattering thing he's ever bellowed:

"Don't tell me how it can't be done. Tell me how it can be done!"

He framed this quote, dated it, and hung it in the hall of our little industrial strip mall office/warehouse. Its level of effectiveness on our motivational levels was about zero. The only thing he ever wrote and hung up that had an effect on our behavior was a reminder to really, really put money in the coin box, and not IOUs, for the honor-pay snack box. The money wasn't going into PJ's pocket The little Bangladesh guy who dropped these off every couple weeks relied on the proceeds to support himself and his family.

At Christmas time PJ would invite the employees over to his Oakville home for dinner. This would be catered and staffed by two people in tuxedo shirts. He would show us his house and then in a show of false modesty proclaim "you'll all have this one day too."

A parquet tiled dance floor with a mirror ball in my basement rec room will be mine too? I don't think so.

The company itself was a somewhat brilliant business venture, if you chucked your ethics to the road side. And in the 1991 recession, no *beep*ing problem. The company was an educational publishing company. It made textbooks, film strips, videos, tapes, and workbooks for use in the education system. The gimmick was these resources were 100% free for the schools to use. How did the company make money? Easy. Big business paid for the development, printing, and distribution.

Why would business pay for stuff like this? Well, not any business. But lets say you're a business with a bad public image, like the nuclear industry. You could spend millions of dollars trying to convince adults that ionizing radiation wasn't actually a bad thing at all. Problem is adults have pretty fixed minds. However, if you started with the minds of young children and educated them Nature pumped out more ionizing radiation than the nuclear industry, well, in a generation or two you'd have a population eager to have a nuclear reactor built in their backyard.

The writers of The Simpsons couldn't think up something like this, although they did.

I'll never forget the company's brochure that promised "get your agenda, your message, in the public school system!"

Now many took the slaughter at Tiananmen Square as a moment to reflect on the nature of democracy and the price that must be paid to win your freedom. PJ Sprout took this as a business opportunity. He had one of his account executives pay a visit to the Chinese consulate in Toronto with a proposal to create an educational module on China. It's a big friendly place full of panda bears and cute little tea cups. You know?

Another client was the tetrapack industry. This was the dawn of the recycling age and tetrapack made these disposable paper juice boxes. Environmentally conscious middle classed mothers might stop putting these in lunch boxes and start giving the kid a damn thermos to lug. (Not a bad thing to heft. A metal thermos at the bottom of a backpack made for an effective weapon against the school yard bully. A good swing of your backpack to the head of the bully, notably the temple area, shut him down pretty quickly.)

The worst one was sponsored by the Fur Council of Canada. They wanted us to create some role playing game about wild life conservation. Leg hold traps only hurt for a couple hours, son. It's a small price to pay to keep the white furred arctic bobcat from breeding out of control and destroying the environment! The unit got called "A Case for the Environment". I should point out they were paying me $12 an hour in 1991, which for your first job out of university was pretty darn good.

I think now "A Case for the Environment" came from the fact out of the various cases the game made, from shooting and eating everything that moved, to eating only the things that moved and themselves tried to eat the moving things humans also found tasty (like cod), there existed a case for the environment.

The only project we ever worked on that seemed to actually have some good was vigorously oppose by PJ Sprout himself. After the whole tampon/toxic shock syndrome debacle, the tampon industry had a lot of make up for. They wanted us to create a module for health class about menstruation. In a multicultural society, how many girls don't learn about magic time and think they're dying. Naturally, tampon use would be a part of it. PJ felt the whole project was immoral and might offend some undefined religious minority. His argument went like this:

"Some cultures consider the hymen sacred. A tampon will break the hymen. People will be offended."

The reality of having to pay for his addiction to expensive single malt scotch eventually won the day and we took the client.

Now if you're still with me and reading this, you're probably saying to yourself "how could the school system fall for this?" Well, first of all, they had to spend less money on textbooks if they were getting stuff for free. Spend money on textbooks or give your school administration staff a raise? Hmmm.

To keep everything ethical and insure we weren't trying to pass off stuff like "WAR IS PEACE! PEACE IS WAR!" the materials were vetted through a committee of actual teachers. They had the power to approve, reject, or suggest changes.

But PJ knew how to game the system. First, we'd make sure the committee was loaded with teachers from the sticks, places like Kapuskasing or North Bay. PJ would fly them to Toronto and put them up for 5 days at the Royal York Hotel. This is the hotel where the Queen traditionally stays if she comes to Toronto. All expenses were paid. Free in room movies, free room service, free dinners in the Royal York's various super expensive restaurants... At the end of this wining and dining they were then asked to sign off on this crap educational material. You can darn well bet they were pretty amenable after 5 days of being treated like big shots.

As I noted above we had a graphic artist and, much to the horror of our super Catholic owner, he was a fairly out homosexual. That he was willing to work for the miserable wages PJ paid him probably made PJ over come his objections to supporting his "lifestyle" with a twice monthly pay check. The artist was a fairly nice guy and I can over look the fact he turned the place into a Mac shop. Computers weren't really a big thing there. The comptroller had a PS2 IBM tower jobby. There was a smaller PS2 desktop that no one used except for me. There was some minicomputer used to maintain the company mailing list and was treated with a certain spiritual reverences like the Winona Ryder Synthetic treats the "Father" computer in Alien 4. Then there were a collection of Macs for the actual layout, writing. Nothing was networked and this was before the Internet. Files were passed around by the sneaker net.

I remember PJ would get done one of his 10 minute manager type books, get loaded at lunch, and then rage at my manager, who was actually also my girlfriend. (Yes, I slept my way to the top), about the need for me, accusing her of the worst kind of inefficiencies. My girlfriend was making $29,000 a year. If she and the other "editorial assistant" (never call her a secretary!) were more efficient, they wouldn't need a third person. Now PJ had four account executives. Each made 50K which in 1991 was a great wage, especially during a recession. PJ and his four account executives did not use a computer. All the text they generated was either hand written or done on Dictaphone. About 20% of my actual time was concerned with using Quark Xpress for layout. The rest was straight text entry. Yawn. It wasn't like any of us were spending our time surfing the net. We were all busy with mostly typing out the verbiage generated by five executives in a day. Oddly he never considered the efficiency of having his upper levels learn how to use a computer and do their own typing.

The other editorial associate was named Elizabeth. She was an interesting piece of work. She was born in Oakville and lived all her life in Oakville. Lil rich girl. For you Seoul types, imagine a 25-year-old woman who was born in Bundang, lived all her life in Bundang, and never left Bundang. Elizabeth could never understand why the comptroller, a Portuguese woman, made more money than her. Her food stank! That's not how the world worked. People who eat stinky food aren't better off.

Basically her daddy did everything for her, protecting her from mean black and brown people who were infesting Toronto and slowly working their way west. She was one of those types that lived in fear that one day she would accidentally press one of those buttons on an elevator that didn't have a whole number on it and this would be the super secret "release elevator cable" button and would plunge her to her death. In other words, she was the perfect Mac user. She knew how to type into it and save/open a file.

One day we had to move the Macs from one room to another room. This was my second day there. I had never actually used a Mac at that point, other than poke a bit a Mac someone had brought into my student newspaper office. I started to unplug the cables (mouse, keyboard, power, and printer cable). Elizabeth was horrified. "Oh my god, don't you want to write down first which cable goes where before you unplug them?"

I blinked and considered my words a moment. "You dumb biactch!" No. Better not. This was only my second day. Instead I said "Errr, it's Mac. It should be self evident where they go."

She gave me this look like I had just said "well, the answer to Fermat's Last Theorem should be self evident" to a first year math student.

My ultimate "sweet jesus, woman" moment with her came during the whole hunt for the killer of Kristin French and Leslie Mahaffey. This was before we found out it was failed accountant Paul Bernardo and his idiot wife. The speculation was that it was one or two blue collar types, a reasonable assumption given the killer had to know how to work with cement and circular saw blades.

Elizabeth was in an Oakville Arby's. There were two "out of place" blue collar types seemingly "innocently" enjoying a roast beef sandwich. What would blue collar types be doing in her Oakville? Clearly they were there HUNTING HUMANS. Oh sure they had fooled the police and the crack staff at Arby's but they weren't fooling her. She listened to their conversation, ostensibly about their efforts to rebuild a car engine. Again, the passive listener would assume they were, you know, actually talking about taking apart an engine. But again, her U of T (Mississauga campus) education had prepared her to see through their complex maze of code words. Engine was code for "school girl". THESE BEASTS WERE TALKING ABOUT DISMEMBERING A 15 YEAR OLD GIRL.

She copied down their plate number when they left. The next day she called the tip line for the task force. She explained how she was pretty sure words like "carburetor" were code for "thigh bone" and redrilling the header was code for "decapitation". She gave them the plate number she copied down and hung up. Now, you'd figure she'd be pretty happy, having just cracked this case. But, no. She was upset.

"The person taking down my report acted like I was crazy."

"Gosh, really?"

Eventually our gay graphic artist got a job in advertising. It's hard to believe but in 1991 not a lot of art departments were using the Mac, or any other computer. Many in the biz referred to it as "the toy". To traditional advertising artists, asking them to draw with a mouse was like asking them to draw with a chalkboard eraser.

Elizabeth took over the gay guy's Mac and discovered a clutch of gay erotica he had crafted on the computer in his spare time. She was, not surprisingly, horrified by this discovery.

Eventually I got laid off, or should I say my contract wasn't renewed. My girlfriend was eventually laid off. To PJ, however, "laid off" meant having an employee who worked from home for no salary. He would call my girlfriend in the weeks after her being laid off. He would ask her all kinds of work related question. How do we do this? What were we supposed to do for X client? And so on. Naturally, after a few weeks away from the job and your mind given to job hunting, you quickly begin to forget certain fine details of what you used to do. I was quite stunned my girlfriend was even giving this old drunk the time of day. But what really made me want to break him in half was when one day she provided him the wrong information. He called her back the next day to chew her out.

*jaw drop*

Chew her out for not doing her not job not properly?

My friend commented to my GF "If he started to chew me out, the only thing he'd hear out of me would be the sound of my phone hanging up."

I really hope PJ Sprout is dead.

[stumptown]

What are you talking about? Need some more meds?

[mindmetoo]

Sean was probably the most offensive person I ever worked with at a software company. And that says a lot, lemme tell you. He was visually offensive. He was a short, stocky man. He was potato shaped. His hygiene was questionable. He was a slovenly dresser. He seemed to shave only once or twice a week. He sweated a lot in summer. He had these weird mutant dwarf ears. He had this little pig like nose. He had no chin. Think of a human version of Bespin Ugnaughts and that's pretty much Sean. I'm no Adonis myself but I compensate by being nice. Sean was vile. Being in public with him was down right embarrassing.

Most of us, if we see an attractive woman coming towards us on the street, aren't above a subtle glance. Sean wouldn't only glance. He'd stop. See, this lengthened the time it took her to close the distance, giving him more time to shamelessly and obviously ogle her considerables. As she tried to ignore this gawking Ugnaught and quicken her pace to get by him, he'd start making not subtle moaning/groaning noises. And when she hustled past him, he'd pivot to inspect her can.

He'd then rejoin us and continue on like he had not just made a mockery of the theory that what allowed us to build a civilization was the brain's ability to keep the male libido in check long enough to develop writing and agriculture.

Sean had a business on the side. This isn't uncommon. Pretty much everyone in the software industry as a business on the side. And many of us aren't above using work resources. One guy I knew in tech support would prepare corporate tax returns between calls. These activities might get you fired. But some might get you fired quicker than others. Sean's business was downloading massive amounts of porn using the company's T1 line (this was before home broadband) and burning CDs which he would sell through a small ad in the back of a free local computer magazine. It kind of reminds me of my friend Don back in high school who amassed a huge collection of porn mags, from Playboy to Swank, and would rent them out other students. Ick.

Not only would Sean use the T1 line but he'd store his CD images on the company's server. Naturally he'd use the company's CD burner to make his CDs (a 2x CD burner sold for about $500 back then). This wasn't known until one day my friend Jason was looking for some image files for something called a "splash screen". When you load a program, the first thing it throws up while it loads the core modules is the splash screen. Your coding can be utter trash but if you have a good splash screen you can fool the great unwashed public.

So my friend Jason did a search on the network, starting at the root, with a pattern like "*splash*.jpg". It found a hit in Sean's porn directory. In Jason's words "splash.jpg wasn't no splash screen image that's for damn certain."

Jason discreetly mentioned this to our manager Stuart, probably the most ethical human being on the planet and the only guy I know who wouldn't actually do work on the side while at his day job. Stuart discreetly mentioned to Sean that he shouldn't keep porn on the company server. We had female employees. Two actually out of a company about 70 men. You know they might not be real thrilled if they found porn. Lawsuits start over this kinda stuff.

We all had a good chuckle when they moved part of our department to a new floor. Sean's cubicle was placed directly outside the VP's office. The VP's and Sean's desks were arranged so the VP would always have a view of Sean's monitor.

Sean, as Stuart explained to me, had a strange up bringing. Think of that movie Shallow Hal. Think of the father. That was Sean's father. Sean's father's greatest accomplishment in life was collecting every single Playboy magazine ever published.

Now at this time Jason and I were single. When you work in software and there are actually more toilets in the women's washroom then there are women at your work, it's hard to meet women. It's made worse by the fact you work in software and your potential dating pool are female urban professionals living in a financial and cultural hub who are really scoping out lawyers, bankers, and advertising executives. Software? Bah hahahahah! You don't hear many women going "Mmmmm Paul Allen I gotta get me some of that!" And Paul Allen plays a mean guitar.

One of the things you do when you're single is you being to mentally identify the other single males in the company. One, you want to know the competition in the rare event they hired a third (ideally, single) woman. Two, you want to make yourself feel better. "Well, sure I'm single, but compared to Weird Frank -- the tester who lives in a flop house; cashes his checks at Money Mart because he hates banks; wears brown leather pants, white sneakers, and an avocado green polyester short sleeved dress shirt to the company Christmas party; and spends his lunch hour down in the parking garage lurking behind pillars -- I've got a far better chance at finding eternal happiness in the arms of a tight little hottie."

Sean, of course, I had on my "he's gotta be single" list.

One day we were discussing the company Christmas party. Sean mentioned "Oh, I'm bringing my girlfriend."

Sean has a girlfriend? WTF?

And not just a GF. They lived together.

I grew very depressed. Partially because it gave me a sense like "God, if he can get a GF and I can't... does that mean I'm more reprehensible?" And partially because I tried to imagine the poor woman reduced to dating and living with Sean. How bad off was this woman that her only option in life was dating Sean? I tried to picture a burn victim. A woman so horribly scarred by a fire that Sean appeared acceptable in her eyes.

I really couldn't wait for the company Christmas party to see Sean's girlfriend. The fateful day arrived. Holy Christ, the woman was hot. And she wasn't a mail order bride. She had this nice black hair, cut short, and a very large rack. The woman was stacked. (Sean would boast, to anyone who cared to listen, that he "had a pair of 38DDs waiting for him at home".)

My whole universe was thrown off kilter that night. But it got worse. Despite having a pair of freely accessible 38DDs at home, Sean seemed to spend a lot of time with us single people on our nights out, on our quests to find a girlfriend in a wine bar or an '80s music dance club. Over Guinness and pan fried calamari, Sean -- like totally out of the f'in blue -- announced he wanted to dump his girlfriend (the one with the 38DDs).

"I want to play the field!" he announced.

That was it. I slammed my hand down on the table.

"PLAY THE FIELD? WHAT FIELD, SEAN? THE FIELD JASON AND I ARE ON? BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHAT? THERE AREN'T A LOT OF WOMEN ON THIS FIELD! WHAT CHANCE DO YOU THINK YOU'LL HAVE? YOU GOT A NICE THING GOING, DON'T RUIN IT!"

How can a man who looks like an Ugnaught and living with a cute woman with 38DDs think he can actually trade up?

A couple months later, I noticed Sean was spending a lot of time with our receptionist. She was the "go to girl", the woman who would pretty much bang any man in the company. You didn't even have to take her out on a dinner date. Sean confessed his love to her. "I love you. If you date me, I'll dump my girlfriend." Gosh what woman doesn't dream of the day Prince Charming lays those words on her?

The receptionist rebuffed his advances. Apparently there was one man in the company she would sleep with and it was him. Now the receptionist would always complain about her own singlehood status. She couldn't figure out why so many men wanted to have sex with her twice, maybe two and a half times, but then didn't want a relationship.

"I'm *beep*able! Just not loveable!" was her rather sad and all too true self-assessment.

So the irony was the one guy at work she couldn't stomach was the one guy who actually wanted a snuggle boos type relationship.

When the receptionist told me about Sean's offer, I mentioned I thought it odd he was so keen to ditch an attractive woman who lives with him , 38DDs 'n' all. The receptionist filled in the details "She won't give him oral."

Ah. That explains it.

[komtengi]

here's a free tip... write a book

[mindmetoo]

My friend Stuart, a very good programmer, was always being taken over. That is to say, no matter which company he went to work for, it was bought out by a bigger company. He worked for a tax software company, STM, and it was bought by Taxprep (the company I worked for). He worked for Delrina and it was bought by Symantec. The list went on and on. The problem with being on the acquired end versus part of the acquiring company is you're usually the first to be screwed over. The rule of thumb is whatever the acquiring company says, believe the exact opposite.

We're not planning to make any changes in the near term: The employees of the acquired company will be laid off within 3 months.

Respecting your corporate culture is key: Once the key tech has been transferred, say good bye to your foozball table, free Coke, and individual offices. It's cubicle hell until you're laid off.


We don't view it as a take over, more of a merger of two equal partners: Kneel before General Zod!

Anyway, Stuart would always get depressed by these take overs. He'd just get comfortable in a new job, get some seniority, and then *boom*. Take over. Since it happened four times in a row, Stuart began to suspect take overs were not so much a common feature of the tech industry but the work of some evil spirit that was out to acquire Stuart. The only way it could do it was buying whatever company Stuart was working for that year.

My tax software company, Taxprep, was eventually bought by a Quebec tax software company, Informatrix. Informatrix was bought by a consumer software company called Softkey.

Many might remember Softkey as the ultimate maker of "toiletware". Toiletware is low grade crappy software you buy, install, try once, and then flush down the toilet because it's bletcherous. Softkey's gimmick was it bought up the rights to abandonware. That's older programs software companies weren't making anymore. Softkey slapped their own splash screens on the software and then packaged the install CD in a very colorful box that made it look like the software might work as promised. It rarely did.

Softkey sold a word processor that was actually an early versions of Microsoft Word (DOS version). It also sold a drawing program that was actually a runtime version of a drawing program that came with the GEM operating system. Huge points for anyone who remembers the GEM O/S for PC.

For some reason Softkey products sold very well, owing to the fact they were first to market with a lot of CD titles when CDs were first appearing in PCs (toiletware was also called shovelware... when a new format comes out you just shovel a lot of crap onto the market). The color box and the $19.99 price helped a lot too. About the only thing they sold that was actually decent were their font collections. Things might have changed a little, but you couldn't patent a font. (Well, you could but it wasn't easy. If you lost 7 fingers building a pipe bomb, you'd still have enough fingers to count the number of fonts that enjoyed patent protection.) The only thing you could do was copyright the name of your font. Softkey would basically steal Adobe's font library and rename them ("Garamond" became "Garamy" or some such crap. Zapf Dingbats became Zippy Dings.) Everybody was actually doing it. CorelDraw came loaded with their own name toasted Adobe fonts.

It seemed odd to most that Softkey, which made cheap crap consumer software, bought a whole Canadian tax software division. Our software was used by the Big Six (then Big Five then Big Four then three bottles of beer on the wall) accounting firms and others for $995. Because the tax forms had to be re done every year, you pretty much had to buy the program every year. I always found it odd, and a little telling, that the only software you have to rebuy once a year is tax software and anti-virus software.

Softkey, apparently, liked the guaranteed, stable cash flow. The problem with being acquired for cash flow, the company likes the cash. R&D? Reinvestment? Raises? Silly, rabbit.

Softkey's owner pissed off pretty much every developer in his employment when in a magazine interview he compared software development to making new brands of cat food. The key wasn't, you know, brilliant programming. It was taking crap already out there and mixing it in new ways.

Softkey went on to acquire Spinnaker software which owned WordStar. It came as news to me that WordStar was actually still around. It had transmogrified into WordStar for Windows although the computing world never noticed. WordStar is a whole other topic of convo. But if you used WordStar when it was pretty much the first PC word processor, you'll understand my horror when the president of our tax software division came to me and said:

"Why do we pay for Microsoft Word when we could use WordStar for free? Can you evaluate WordStar for use within the company?"

I quickly went to see Stuart and told him of my conversation with the president. Stuart looked like he wanted to jump out a window.

I looked at WordStar. And I gave the president my report. "It has no spell checker. You can't open multiple documents. We're at a point now where most of our staff just barely understands how to use Word. Retraining them on WordStar would be a nightmare. Most of our templates and documents we use for external communication won't work with WordStar. We'd have to recreate those. Word has several free tools that are critical for my ability to create our documentation and help systems."

The president, thankfully, dropped his damn fool WordStar idea. The day was saved.

The only good thing about Softkey buying Spinnaker software was Spinnaker was based in Boston and this gave the owner an excuse to move to America. We were sharing these very fancy corporate offices with Softkey's head honchos. They were all arrogant suits and we were mostly barefoot hippies. I used to have to listen to the company's corporate lawyer drone on and on about his marital problems and his conversations with his stock broker. Taxprep was eventually sued for anti trust violations. We probably shouldn't have lost but the corporate lawyer was so incompetent we did.

Softkey went on to buy Broderbund, the company that made Myst. It's one thing to be a crappy software company and you're buying software companies that haven't been major names since 1989. But when you're buying a hot game company and the owner is on record calling you cat food mixers, well, these hot shot Silicon Valley developers aren't going to be very happy.

It proved a huge disaster. Somehow the founder managed to convince Mattel to buy Softkey. The company bled cash. In 1999 the Softkey division caused Mattel to lose $200 million. The CEO of Mattel had to quit over this. It's amazing if you think this whole Softkey company was founded by a guy in Etobicoke who wrote a crappy bit of BASIC software to create charts on a dotmatrix printer. He formed Softkey around that bit of toiletware. He went on to disgrace Mattel and force its CEO to resign!

Meanwhile, Taxprep sure didn't fit into Mattel's core competencies. The whole tax division was sold off to CCH, a legal and tax publishing company. That made sense. Our Quebec overlords retained the day to day management of the division. The Quebec HQ were always serious *bleep*-ups. That's fine. Everyone *bleeps*-up. However, what makes it difficult to deal with is when they cover for their incompetence with a high level of arrogance. "We are French. Naturally, everything we do will be better."

The Quebec office decide to adopt a multi-platform development environment. For the non-technical that means you write the code once, press a button, and it creates a Windows, DOS, and Mac version. Uh huh. Like it's that simple. I mean it says right on the box and all the brochures. Right. Anyway, the Toronto office told the Quebec office that it's not a bad idea, but it's a two year project. The Quebec office "Naw, we can do it in a summer. We're French! We can do the impossible!" The cost savings (ie being able to get rid of 2/3 of the development staff) would make it all worth it. One thing we did notice when we went to Sherbrooke, Quebec for meetings, the Quebec office was bloated with staff. My job, for example, which only required me, required three different people in Quebec.

Okay.

Naturally it was a huge disaster. They had to bring in some consultant from the development environment company itself to try and get the Mac version to work. He only billed US$200 an hour for this service. He gave up. He couldn't get it to work.

Again this was before the Internet really took hold and you couldn't just puke out a 1.0 version and then patch it. Patching was a huge expense in those days. Usually we issued two version of our software during the tax season. The first version was good for about 90% of a tax preparer's clients. The second version covered all the tricky stuff: People who earn income in three countries, have legal residences in two provinces and a second country. I think we ended up releasing five versions. We're talking the space of January to April.

Tech support calls, as you could imagine, were tremendous. The number of death and bomb threats we got made you question the image of the staid tax accountant. Our poor Mac users we kind of had to just tell "well, errr, sorry. Can you rent a PC for the tax season? We'll give you a free version of the Windows or DOS client."

Anyway, it was a huge disaster, foisted upon us by the Quebec office. Since the bulk of our clients were in Toronto and English Canada we got dumped on the worst.

Now you might wonder why we didn't lose huge numbers of customers. Simply put, we had no competition on the high end. It's comparatively easy to develop a tax package for home users but it's not so easy to write tax code for the tricky stuff, the stuff that causes people to run to CAs. Our barrier to entry was the massive costs a competitor would have to endure to create a high end tax package for a reasonably small market. We got there because we had been in the market since the dawn of the PC revolution. It's one thing to spend ten years tweeking your software. It's another thing trying to try and recreate ten years of work in one fiscal year.

Even the big accounting firms had a pow wow, realizing their lucrative tax preparation business was reliant upon the work of one small software company with a mercurial past. If Taxprep went belly up, got hit by a comet, or the programmers all died of food poisoning during the development cycle, the Big Six firms would be in one huge heap of trouble. The food poisoning risk actually almost happened. We all went out for dim sum one day in the middle of our development cycle. Half the developers ate this spicy squid dim sum. Half didn't. The half that ate the squid were in bed for three days with food poisoning. The Big Six determined that, even sharing the costs between them, and having the most brilliant minds in accounting, the costs and efforts weren't worth it.

One of the other hooks all tax software companies used was the file format was proprietary. You can't open a Taxprep tax return file in a competitor's program. Inside each tax return file is a huge amount of "roll forward" information, stuff you don't want to retype every year... everything from names and addresses to a person's RRSP carry forward. If you have 2,000 tax files, you don't want to retype that. The files were all in a binary format and not easy to reverse engineer. One company found a funny and obvious work around. We were going to sue them until we discovered their simple and obvious solution. Instead of printing to the printer, our software let you print to a postscript file. Before PDF, this was the only way you could create a portable document file. Postscript files were "flat", a text file filled with the most unreadable scripting code. One could simply batch print all your files to a postscript file and then use a utility to read the scripting and suck out the relevant roll forward information.

Naturally we got rid of the print-to-file option next season.

Quebec's next proud moment was poor accounting. You would think a company full of CAs could get book keeping right. But no. They got confused on how we recognized revenue for our corporate tax package. They recorded the income twice. And guess what, when you do that, you end up realizing a mysterious $1 million profit at years end! Well, didn't the Quebec office big wigs strut around like peacocks.

Of course after an audit they had so much egg on their faces. By now our CCH overlords were really starting to take notice. It's one thing to piss off your entire client base, it's another thing to lose money. What turned out to be a $1 million profit ended up being a $1 million loss.

CCH told the Quebec head office "well, fix the problem. Cut $1 million out of expenses or you're all shyte canned."

So. What to do? What to do? Ah, close the Toronto office was their solution. Naturally we didn't know this was their evil plan. And here is where we were lured into a strange realm. For nearly a year, the Quebec office kept doing funny things. Why weren't they giving us a budget to hire new testers? Our receptionist was leaving, why weren't they giving us the go head to hire a new receptionist? Our lease was soon to expire on our expensive corporate office. We knew we'd be moved to cheaper environs but why weren't they coming up with a moving plan? Why were they wanting the Taxprep web site moved to the Calgary servers?

In any other universe this would be like someone shouting in your ear with a bullhorn "they're planning to close your office". But when you're used to five years of the Quebec office stumbling from one *bleep* up to another and just generally having their heads up their ass, it's very easy to blame these things on the Quebec office merely being their typical self. A plan? They never have a plan.

Except this once. They had to do this quietly as this was 1998 and the economy was cooking. Any hint of a layoff would see the immediate exit of your staff and there would be no one left to tell the Quebec office how we did things.

Things were getting to a critical point where we finally told the big wigs in Quebec that we needed a meeting pronto. We scheduled a meeting two weeks hence. Three days after our meeting demands we got an email. Like everyone in the company got an email. "Mandatory meeting tomorrow for all staff at the Toronto Airport Hilton." My friend Stuart has this spot on theory that the amount of time between when a meeting is announced and when it is actually held and the positive implications of that meeting follow an inverse proportional rule. Hence, "Stuart, in my office NOW!" rarely implies your boss is about to inform you of a raise.

We all showed up. Some people we never met before said "we're closing the Toronto office you are all laid off." Some of us were canned that day. Some of us were given a few months to transfer knowledge. We got severance packages. I had never been laid off from a job, ever and at first I was in shock. But then I realized "wait, I got savings. I got in my hands a severance check for two months salary. The economy is good. If I can't find a new job in two months, I'm not trying."

I drove home from the hotel. Naturally we were not all allowed to return to our offices for fear we'd start erasing files 'n' junk. We could go back in a week or two to collect our personal effects.

I got home and my answering machine was blinking. My friend Martin, a VP at a dot.com had called me. "Hey, I heard you just got laid off at Taxprep. Want a job? One thing. You'll have to be prepared to move to Seattle."

I was laid off in the morning and I had a new higher paying job that afternoon. And two months pay in the bank. And a chance to move some place where they don't really have Canadian winters.

Good times.

The layoff package came with a couple months of free service from some weird out placement service. This out placement service wasn't like a job placement service. They didn't find you a job. They kind of kept you from killing yourself or going postal. They had all these counseling programs helping you deal with the loss of your job, how to write a resume, boning up your interviewing skills, etc. I never took advantage of any of these services, as I had a new job. But my friend Lorna would go. She said it was a grim environment. Most of the people who went to these things were old, men in their 50s who had worked for the same company for 25 years and were now laid off. They were serious emotional wrecks. I almost wanted to go to a meeting just so I could maybe freak them out a bit. Spend all my time in these group sessions muttering lines from Full Metal Jacket.

[Bulsajo]

I haven't finished reading the thread yet, but-

I will buy your book.

[just because]

i have no ida what you are talking about half the time but it is a good story...

So why are you here again???

[mindmetoo]

Thank you for the good feedback. Why am I here? If it isn't obvious from the stories above that I was anxious to trade software/dot.com bull crap for hagwon bull crap....

The Paul Allen Effect

There is, or was, a thing called the "Paul Allen Effect". Paul Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft and usually cited as the third or fourth richest man in the world. Allen is barely heard of outside of the Pacific Northwest but in Seattle and Portland he's on par with Rameses II. The guy builds great monuments: stadiums, museums, office complexes. Allen, as some might know, got cancer in the early days of Microsoft. He left to fight his cancer. After remission, he never really went back. He was probably only a millionaire a hundred times over back then but even back then he judged he had enough money to last a lifetime, and understood that lifetime could be foreshortened, so why punch a clock? A fan of Jimi Hendrix, he learned to play guitar. He opened a museum in Seattle devoted to rock 'n' roll (originally it was supposed to be a museum devoted to Hendrix but there was a falling out early on between Allen and the Hendrix family). He built a football stadium in downtown Seattle, despite a city plebiscite rejecting it!

Allen and his holding company Vulcan Ventures (sometimes called Vulture Ventures for its habit of buying control of companies when their stock crashes) invests a lot of money in all kinds of crazy things, from dot.com start ups to pay per view TV. If word leaks out Allen might invest in a company, the stock price can shoot up considerably. That's The Paul Allen Effect. My company Infospace was once subject to the Paul Allen effect in the Seattle medical community. I didn't discover this until I was actually a patient in a Seattle area hospital.

A few years ago I had a lung lump turn up on a chest xray. This required a CT-guided biopsy. You have to spend a day in hospital. The procedure takes 30 minutes but they need to hold you for the rest of the day to make sure your lung doesn't collapse. I never really put Infospace's health plan to the test until then. Turned out we had a solid gold health plan. I had a private room. The whole procedure cost about $20,000. In the states you actually get a copy of the bill they send to your insurance company. That's pretty cool. Despite a 20K bill, my out of pocket expense was $5. That's what I had to pay for a day of parking in the hospital parking garage.

Now I guess on your medical chart they put who you work for because every time a nurse or doctor or candy striper looked at my chart the person would say "Oh, you work for Infospace. I bought some shares in that company. How is it doing?"

How it was doing was this: 8 months ago a share was selling for $150. When I was admitted to the hospital the share price was $15.

I repeated to everyone what I was always told at the company staff meetings. "Well, the share price is down but the company's fundamentals are solid. We have no long term debt and we have $250 million in cash in the bank. Our cash burn rate is $10 million a year. We can burn cash at this rate for 25 years and still be n business. We're not teetering on bankruptcy."

We were in a very curious position, one that a lot of dot.coms actually found themselves in shortly after the crash. Our market cap (ie our company's worth based on our stock price) was LOWER than our actual assets (90% being a huge wad of cash in the bank). This meant, conceivably, you could buy the whole company for $200 million, every single outstanding share. You could then close down the company and put $250 million cash in your pocket.

To protect yourself from this kind of Gordon Geko style raid you get the shareholders to approve a "poison pill". In the event of what the board would judge a hostile takeover, every share holder would get 4 shares for every share held.

Anyway, after about the third time I was asked by a medical professional to give my prognosis on the health of Infospace, I asked "errr, how come everyone who reads my chart keeps asking me that?"

The nurse responded "Oh, a few months ago there was a doctor on staff who told everyone he heard Paul Allen was going to invest a lot of money in Infospace. So we all bought stock. Ha ha."

I sensed this doctor was no longer on staff. I also sensed a small background conflict of interest here and I decided to use it to my advantage. I quipped (read LIED) to the nurse "Oh! Well, let everyone know that I'm critical to the well being of Infospace. If something happens to me here in the hospital, Infospace is doomed."

[guangho]

Not software but...


In New York, I used to work on political campaigns- Kerry, Dean, other washed up folks. (When not working in the legal field, an area I feel I have adequately covered in a previous post.) So one day I send out a resume to an ad seeking a campaign manager. We meet up at my Harlem brownstone (If you're from NYC, the words Harlem brownstone have the same effect as Viagra).

Middle aged Jamaican lass named Keisha. A bit the nervous sort and about the size of a toothpick but what the hey. Turns out she is running as a Republican in Harlem. Clever gal. We sit down on the stoop and hash out THE GREAT CAMPAIGN.

Me: "So where is your office?"
Keisha: "Oh my brother in law lets me use the basement in his antiques shop."
Me: "Huh. Who is your treasurer?"
Keisha: "My brother in law."
Me: "Wow. So do you have any fliers?"
Keisha: "Fliers?"

This goes on for about twenty more minutes. Finally we get down to STRATEGY.

Keisha: "So you're gonna win this right?"
Me: "WE are going to win this."
Keisha: "Oh."
Me: "Do you go to church?" (I'm a heathen bastard but this is Harlem and you're running for city council. Use some common sense.)
Keisha: "Not really."
Me: "Start."
Keisha: "Ahhh...um...where?"
Me: "Well there is ABC A.M.E, DEF A.M.E., GHI A.M.E. (this list goes on for quite some time.)"
Keisha: "And what do you do there?"
Me: "Just umm....listen to the pastor and uh...dress up, I guess."
Keisha: "I don't know. I don't really like black people."
Me: "You're black."
Keisha: "I guess. Huh."
Me: "So start liking yourself pronto."

She got 25% of the vote. I made twenty bucks (I am not kidding-and she made me write a receipt for it) and let me tell you, I earned every cent.

Korea, I love you.

[mindmetoo]

Back when I worked for my university newspaper there was this "veteran" student named Bernie. Bernie was a man in his 30s, had a couple advanced degrees under his belt, but little or no aspirations (or patience) to work a real-life job. Bernie eked out a marginal living renting out his fixer-upper house, taking low paying jobs in student media (like The Lance, the radio station...), and buying junk, reconditioning it, and selling it. He'd sell the stuff to friends, co-workers, people he met at a bar... really anyone with not a lot of money, a need for a durable good, and some level of impaired judgment. The term "A Bernie Special" was coined to imply a product that cost little but never worked or when it did work, the so-called labor saving device required considerable time/energy to make it work right.

Bernie Specials always had some peculiarity. For example, he would sell you a computer for $200 but note you had to keep the power supply on top of a bag of ice because it heated up too much (he would, of course, offer you a deal on an ice maker he found behind an abandoned motel and reconditioned). He'd sell you an air conditioner for $75 and while setting it up for you (Bernie was always glad to come around the dinner hour to help set something up) he would note the unit's fan emitted a foul smell. He'd advise that when you ran the air conditioner you place a running fan facing the unit to blow back the toxic gasses. He assured you that, despite the fact the cold air was all being blown back into the air conditioner, this arrangement would still keep your apartment cool. It was creating a thermal vortex or some Larry Nivenesque phenomenon that would suck up all the heat tachyons.

Bernie would also plaster every bulletin board on campus with there weird hand drawn flyers selling all manner of surplus and reconditioned junk he either found or snapped up from a police auction for pennies on the dollar. His flyers would always have this big hand written scrawl "DEALS 'O' PLENTY" across the top.

Bernie was one of those mad genius types and the spitting image of Matt Frewer's Max Headroom. He really did live twenty minutes into the future. This was particularly noticeable when he engaged you in conversation. Bernie started conversations as if he was already half way into them. One moment he would be quietly sitting next to you, eyeing your pitcher of beer, and the next moment he would pipe up with something like "Then the car door opened and some boxes spilled out. Seeing as how no one was coming back to collect the boxes I grabbed them myself. Turns out they were full of frozen chickens. If you're interested in buying some��"

Bernie, like many student journalist types at that time, was a chain smoker. The problem was Bernie always seemed short of cash. Chain smoking doesn't come cheap, especially in Canada. Bernie decided to quit. I credit Bernie with inventing the method of quitting smoking by not actually quitting smoking. You simply quit buying cigarettes. Since you have a wide circle of friends, associates, coworkers, customers, and tenants who all smoke, it's quite easy to hit one of them up for a butt. You can work your way through your roster of friends/associates for several months before people catch on that every time you see Bernie, he always seems to have been caught short for smokes, and wouldn't you spot him a ciggie?

Bernie's other addiction was beer -- yet another expensive pursuit in the heavily taxed realm of Canada. Bernie realized he could brew and bottle his own beer at home for a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, Bernie's first batch did not turn out very well. I think there's some kind of aging/malting process involved that he sort of skipped over. What most people would recognize as an unrecoverable disaster, Bernie saw as an opportunity. He could simply bring a six pack of his skunky concoction to parties and trade it for real beer. All he had to do was convince slightly inebriated party go'ers of the purity and quality inherent in his homebrewed beer.

Even Bernie had to admit rapid defeat in another cost-cutting measure. While food can't rightly be called an addiction or an unnecessary expense, it still costs money. One can always trim some fat. Bernie devoted his mad skillz0rs to cutting back drastically on his food budget. After some research he found that the Reagan administration, in its quest to devise a strategy for winning a nuclear war, had determined the surviving American population could be adequately fed with a thick gruel that provided subsistence levels of calories and vitamins. This survival food could be made for pennies a pound, versus the extortion-level prices butchers were charging for baloney. Bernie got a hold of this recipe and made up a huge batch. His idea was to freeze it into meal-sized cubes and then eat that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now, the problem with gruel is, unlike say pizza, you don't even want to eat gruel once, let alone three times a day for however long it takes to pay off your mortgage. And unlike his home-brewed beer plan, you can't trade frozen gruel to anyone for anything, no matter how drunk they are.

[mindmetoo]

The parking garage at my dot.com was this weird metric for how hard you worked. By hard work (at a dot.com) I mean "how effectively can you convince the people paying your salary that you're actually earning your salary via a process where you trade useful labor for remuneration when in fact no one ever gives you any work and you spend your day surfing the web and planning your next trip to Asia."

You know, that kind of hard work.

Anyway, the parking garage had about 5 or 6 levels. The most preferable place to park was on A or B. It was less of a ride up/down the elevator. At the end of the day, an extra 3 minutes in an elevator and an extra 5 minutes driving out of the parking garage really seemed like a big deal. (In Toronto, a coworker used to park his car on the lowest level, despite there being plenty of parking spaces 2 levels above. One day the president of the company asked him why he parked there. His answer was "I only park there in winter. If you park on the bottom level, it's warm enough and all the ice and slush melts.")

Naturally, the early birds got a spot on A or B. Despite the software world's tolerance for people who like to start their days at 11 am, I would get a jump on the lack of work I had to do by dragging myself into work at 8:30 am. I'd even go in on Saturdays. I think my most important contribution to the company was being the guy who got our floor's coffee machine started most mornings.

Anyway, you get to know what employee drives what car. People learned that the lil red car with the plate that said "WRYTER" and what looked like a Pepsi logo bumper sticker to most (it was, in fact, a Korean flag) was my car. Many took note that I usually parked on B and they had to find a spot on D or E and that meant I came in reasonably early.

I usually knocked off work about 5:30 pm. Although I had a fairly easy commute, straight down a road that ran along Lake Washington, I didn't like having to make the required left hand turn out of the parking garage. There was no traffic light and the garage driveway was a very steep incline. With a manual transmission, this required some exacting coordination between your gas pedal/brake foot, your clutch foot, your gear shifting hand, and your ability to estimate if you had time to zip through cars in the right and left lanes.

Since I basically went home, insured my apartment had not burned down, and then got back in my car and went to a Seattle's Best Coffee in my neighborhood, I realized I could just walk to a Starbucks from work instead. I'd take along my laptop work provided for me after I convinced them I needed one for some very important work I'd likely have to do at some newly acquired offices on Puget Sound. At the Starbucks I'd drink coffee, read the paper, and use the laptop to dupe down and edit some 150 hours of tape I had made of a comedy radio show I used to do.

I'd then go back to my car at about 7:30 pm and go home.

One day my coworker Rosaline commented. "You know, I've noticed you put in some long hours. You get here pretty early in the morning and when I leave work about 7 pm, your car is still there."

To Ros I could not lie. "Oh no. I only work until 5 or 5:30 then I go to Starbucks."

"Oh.