My friend Sarah Gould keeps telling me I should write an autobiography because I love telling stories. I cannot deny the premise of the argument, and I know I want to redevelop my writing skills; thus, I’m going to start capturing some of those tales of how I got from there to here. Like all good stories, I’m going to start in the middle. Don’t expect any of this to be linear.
Therefore, we won’t yet get into the tale about why I was sitting in Pittsburgh at the tail end of a hot summer and got quasi-kidnapped into a crowded VW van and dumped on the side of the road in Santa Cruz, California. Nor will I talk about learning theatrical fencing (poorly) while temping for PG&E. Nope, we’re going to skip ahead to the bit where my housemate Trip and I heard from our friend Bruce Woodcock that his employer, Netcom Online Communications, was hiring tech support people. It was 1994. Anything seemed possible. I knew a little UNIX; I could do that. Ultimately I was planning on being a tech writer, so this wouldn’t be my long term career, but it’d do quite well as a foot in the door.
I’d met Trip on the Internet. More specifically, we’d met on TinyMUD, the text-based multi-user game slash chat server. Like me, he was a tabletop gamer. He was part of the Caltech alumni crew I’d fallen in with in California, and I think we were good housemates. Netcom was not the only time I’d wind up working with him.
Netcom was one of the early internet service providers, or ISPs. In the early 90s, the world was slowly waking up to the idea that there was this thing called the Internet which was a lot rougher around the edges than AOL or Compuserve, but which still let you communicate with people all over the world. Also the Internet was typically cheaper; CompuServe wanted hourly fees on top of a monthly subscription fee, for example. Netcom and other ISPs like it just wanted $20 or so a month.
I won’t get deep into Netcom’s architecture and facilities today. I didn’t know anything about them back then. All I knew is that I had a Netcom account, which I used via my dial-up modem which I couldn’t use at the same time as I used my single phone line for phone calls, plus I had to share it with my housemates. I also knew that I wasn’t making a lot of money temping and my housing situation (subsidized by the parents of our third housemate) seemed a little precarious. So when Bruce said they needed people and he could get us in the door, it sounded like a plan.
Neither Trip or I had a car at the time. Getting from Santa Cruz to Tisch Way in San Jose, where Netcom was located, was a matter of hopping on the Highway 17 Express bus and riding it for an hour. It ran regularly but not frequently.
So the two of us truck out to Netcom. I don’t think I’d ever interviewed for a real job before. I had no idea what to expect. Preconceived ideas wouldn’t have mattered much anyhow; Bob Rieger, founder and CEO, was a one of a kind character. He’d started Netcom because he was taking classes in information systems and it was really annoying to use the school systems. He set up some old x86 PCs running Xenix – an old UNIX for Intel servers – attached some modems to them, started taking money from his classmates in exchange for server access, and expanded from there. He was the model of an early Internet entrepreneur, technically savvy and very hungry.
In retrospect I think the interview was just him trying to see if there were any obvious red flags. Bob desperately needed a tech support employee on swing shift and graveyard shift as the company expanded to more and more US locations; Bruce was a smart trusted employee, so unless we drooled on his desk we were gonna be hired.
The one critical question Bob raised was “So when you start working, how the hell are you going to get to work on time reliably?” That Highway 17 Express didn’t run after midnight, after all, so he wasn’t about to hire a couple of nerds who lived in Santa Cruz with no cars. This was the moment I realized that I wasn’t going to have to wait to find out if I had a real job, as long as I could come up with a good answer to his question on the spot. I have always thought well on my feet, so I said “Well, after you offer me the job, Trip and I are going to walk out of here and head south on Winchester Boulevard, visiting every apartment complex we see, and we won’t stop until we have a place to live.”
Turns out that “I am going to move very close to your office” was the correct answer. These days I would be more reluctant to be quite that close to my employer, particularly since Bob was the kind of guy who would have called me to make me come into the office to reboot servers. I was less wary then and Bob was pretty happy with my potential devotion. He nodded and smiled and said the job was mine. I walked out of there on a cloud, told Trip what the rest of our day was going to look like, and waited for his “interview” to finish. At no point in here did I think about salary or negotiation, which is why I wound up working for Netcom for $30K a year in 1994. It’s OK, I figured that one out in under a year and really, it was better than temping anyhow.
I did remember to ask about tech writing. Bob looked me in the eye and promised me that as soon as they opened up a tech writer role, it would be mine. I believed him, as I was the kind of idiot who didn’t negotiate salary, and perhaps he meant it. He never opened a tech writer job during the year or so I was there; my career advancement took an entirely different form.
After the interviews, we fulfilled our promise. It took three or four complexes before we hit a place with a one bedroom available. I was going to be on swing shift while Trip was on graveyard shift, so we could take turns using the bed until a two bedroom opened up, which did happen in a couple of months. Acceptable compromise.
And that is how I got my job at what is still the most Wild West employer I’ve ever had.