Living Under My Desk

The bubble burst.
That’s what everyone was saying.

I had been working as a network engineer for a company called Value America.
They were paying me, a 17-year-old who had been kicked out of college and didn’t even have a high school diploma yet, $250,000 per year.

The owner, a guy named Craig, apparently followed John Mellencamp’s advice and took the money and ran.

That job lasted maybe eight months.
I had stock options that, at one point, were worth $22 million on paper. There was no vestment period, the company just issued all new employees a tonne of equity. The dot-com bubble was amazing and completely unsustainable.

I used an option liquidity broker at the height of their value to borrow a few million against.
I didn’t see any downside.
After all, this was just the start and there was no sight in end for the tech boom to slow down.

Then it all came crashing down.

At Value America, we had a slogan: We’re Number One.
Turns out, that was true.
We kicked off the bubble burst.

I went from about to close on a multi-million-dollar house to homeless overnight.

I called up Shane and asked if he needed a network engineer.

“I just sold the ISP,” he said. “To a guy named Edgar. I’ll make a call though.”

A few days later, Chris called me up. Chris was the effective CTO of the company, not that it was big enough to have that as an official title. Chris told they needed someone who knew what the fuck they were doing to get the tech support department running, and asked if I was up for the job.

Of course I was.

We agreed on the details, and I went from making $250K to $25K.

Ouch.

I was a night owl, so I primarily took late evenings. Not quite third shift, but close.

I hired a few folks I knew, and several I didn’t, but they seemed good and were friends of friends.
Ash was one of them, and for a while Ash and I were pretty close.

As part of the sale, Edgar renamed the company from FirstNet to NeXeT.
I always wondered if he was trying to make us sound like Jobs’ new company at the time, NeXT.

There was Joel, who I’d gone to school with.
He worked graveyard shift with me.
We’d tinker with the gear in the server room.

I remember the Ericsson Tigress routers.
Ericsson sold them to us for a song, probably fallout from the industry collapse that was starting to ripple through. We had at least two dozen of the three slot routers, a handful of the seven slot routers, and about 4 of the eleven slot routers.

The office was downtown Charlottesville, just off the Downtown Mall right around the corner from Miller’s Bar. We would hang out at Millers when not working, as it was one of the places that would never card me and it was fun to watch Dave Matthews Band play pretty regularly.

We had the entire first floor of the building, but it was otherwise residential. We retrofitted half the space to be a cold server room.

I was one of three engineers with a permanent desk.
It was a huge plywood built-in, wedged between two structural columns and backed against the new server room we’d just built.

I stapled up some fabric over the under desk opening and brought in a sleeping bag. No one questioned me, and I didn’t tell anyone I was homeless.
Everyone just thought I worked a lot since I was always there.

I hid a small suitcase under the desk.
The rest of my crap was in the trunk of the Sebring.
Thankfully the bathroom had a shower, which made staying hygienic at least possible.

There was another Chris, Chris W, on the network team.
And Sergio, who came over from Value America with me when we got laid off.

I snagged one of the 3-slot Tigress routers and started experimenting.
I was trying to retrofit new DSP designs I was working on.

56.6k modems were the latest and greatest at the time.
I had been playing with implementing a faster Fourier Transform in hardware on the Tigress, and writing a dialup front end app that would

In the lab, I was getting speeds around 256k with unmodified client modems.

Eventually, Noah, Chris W., Sergio, and I all went in on renting a house together.

Those were amazing times.
While they lasted.
Which wasn’t for long. The good times never last long enough.