Dot bomb

Several years ago I took an interesting job. I have my wife to thank for it honestly. I was working 3rd shift at a factory that paid pretty well but 3rd shift and my body don't play well together. I end up getting sick for whatever reason and my wife (she was but a girlfriend at that time) pressed me to look for something new. I was looking through the local paper one day when I came across a job that really seemed too good to be true. It was a position for a database administrator and while I would have loved to have it, I didn't feel I was qualified enough to take the position. She pressed me to submit a resume and I gave in. I ended up getting that job. I was to be the database administrator for (at the time) the largest Dish Network dealership in the world. I dealt with everything from the customer data to the monetary transactions and I was very proud to do the work I was doing. I worked with several other people in what we called "the cave" which was just the IT room that we kept dark. We had a lot of good times in the cave and I still visit it every time I go into town.

When I arrived there were a few people already working there. We had a network administrator, a programmer, a boss, and a data entry person. After my arrival we hired a few more programmers, several more data entry clerks, and even people to file. We also added a full customer service area with as many as 20 reps at one time. The database we used was set up to allow access to certain data based on their login privileges and it was all running quite smoothly. There were stressful moments to be sure but in retrospect I enjoyed it.

The owner decided to get started on the dot com business since it was taking off like mad at that time. We were all pretty excited to add that to our resume so we undertook the challenge. We were working for the owner of our company but he was listed as a consultant in the corporation that was doing the actual dot com. This will get confusing and there are several reasons for this. One of them being the fact that the owner of the company I worked for had a library in his office with such titles as "Offshore banking and how it can work for you" and other such tomes. The plan was we were to make a store. We were going to take that one step further and make a store that we could put anyone's logo on and they could sell stuff for us. Branding is common in business circles and it seemed like a good merge for schools to use as fund raisers and whatnot. The affiliates, schools, churches, whatever, would receive a part of the profits for bringing their customers to their store and buying stuff. The database work on this monumental task was daunting to say the least. I worked many long hours to get this accomplished and had even wallpapered the cave with diagrams of tables and relationships so the programmers could get a handle on the situations. I recall one stretch where I worked 20 hours at a sitting and I also recall waking up under my desk a few times. We were enticed by raises and stock options. Our stock options weren't to be exercised until sometime the next year or something like that for $2 a share.

The corporate people were drumming up venture captial at an amazing rate and our stock was really going through the roof. By the time things were in a frenzy our stock had split 3 times and was selling for about $19 a share. At that point I was worth about 3 million dollars. Yes, I was in hog heaven, really thinking I was going to be able to nest and stash and enjoy the rest of my life in retirement before too long.

The store was up and running but the people in the warehouse (the family of the corporate people in florida) couldn't get a single order right. I purchased my fair share through the website and not one time did they get my order right. Sometimes they would send me an item worth ten times what I had paid for and other times they would just put in too many or too few. I recall one of the excuses was that they were bound to get more accurate as the orders increased. I brought up these issues to my boss and he assured me he would look into the whole thing. I don't know what happened from there but it was about that time they decided to switch tracks. The store was closing and we were switching to a "portal" type setup as they called it.

Portals are great. Yahoo has a good one, MSN does well, Google is even quite a good portal of sorts. We were not. We offered links that we got off of commercial link services that paid a small percentage of everything bought to the company. We'd then divvy up that income to the affiliates. We were all against this but we were but employees who did what we had to do. The database was rewritten to accomodate and the site went up. I kept up with the links, making sure they were all good and working, and I made an interface where people could add more links that would show up in whatever category. I brought up the fact that while we had plenty for people to click on we were not a real portal because we had no content. Nowhere on the site did we offer anything other than links related to "x" and this was not a portal in my opinion. I was hushed and along we went.

Around this time the owner of the company I worked for bought a new Mercedes S500. At the time it didn't hit me but in retrospect I see how it all went down. I couldn't understand how or why he would buy a $100,000 car when things looked so bleak on the work front. He always seemed chipper about the work thing and really thought it was going to take off any time. I didn't agree and him buying a car of that magnitude while I was driving a 5 year old Chevy metro, our network administrator was driving a 10 year old civic, and one of our other programmers was driving a 10 year old dodge pickup just didn't seem right. We weren't raking in the dough, we were just sitting on stock options that we couldn't touch. It was the promise of money that kept us from straying. It was during this period that I had a couple breakdowns and was always on edge. I hated myself for staying and I hated the company for keeping me there. I pretty much hated life and wasn't afraid to show it. I knew doom was coming and there wasn't a thing I could do about it because my voice of reason was not being heard. I very much wanted this thing to work because I had a lot invested in it through time, effort, and general energy. I wanted to succeed so I wanted the company to succeed.

On the dish network side of things it seemed there was some hanky panky going on where the business manager wasn't refunding the appropriate amount of money to the customers for their installs or some such nonsense and the company was fined millions of dollars. The owner of the company I worked for put the S500 in his father's name and declared bankruptcy. He assured us this wouldn't effect our positions since we were directly working for the dot com. I knew at this point things were about to get sour.

Two days before my birthday I was told we were being laid off. The stock price had plummetted and they assured us they'd bring us back as soon as there was capital enough to do so. They've yet to call me back.

This brings me to a movie I recently saw called Fun with Dick & Jane starring Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni. It's quite the cute movie and I highly recommend it. It seems to be the story of Enron but it makes me think back to the days of the dot bomb so much I don't think it's a healthy movie for me. The owner of the company I worked for even resembles the leader of "Globodyne" and has many of the same mannerisms. I don't think I've ever been as funny as Jim Carrey or as pretty as Tei Leoni so I guess I'll stop the similarities there. The owner is still plugging away at a web site I started for him while I was in my last few days there and it seems to be doing well for him. I wonder sometimes what the shady part of that deal is though. Maybe it's the bitter taste still left in my mouth or just a paranoia that I may never shake. I'm not one to hold a grudge in most cases but I certainly do learn my lessons well.