COOKIE AND HER HOT AIR BALLOON RIDE

                                                                 KARL WALLACE


                                     COOKIE AND HER HOT AIR BALLOON RIDE

     Right now you’re reading a story that I’ve written, but actually I wrote this story as it was told to me by a
woman by the name of Dona (Cookie) Miller, a pleasant lady.
In her own words near as I can remember:

“When I finished my finals in Computer Science at Weber State, Microsoft hired me aboard. The date was
June 3, 1993. I was in an excited state of mind, and within a few days of being hired, I jumped out of bed before the crack of dawn. I drove my car hastily to the Weber State football field located in the foothills of Ogden, Utah.

     I unloaded my car in preparation for my trip to Seattle in my hot air balloon. I then drove back to my
apartment parked my car in the back yard. I then woke up my teenage boy, Raskel, called a taxi and
went back to the football field, arriving there just as the sun was peeking over Mount Ogden.

     We placed our belongings in my gondola and walked aboard. A quick blast of propane (100 million British Thermal Units), and the balloon launched upward carrying two excited individuals. As the ground grew farther away, ‘Midnight Blue’ extended herself eight stories top to bottom, and began silently moving west north west toward our destination, Micro-Soft Seattle.

     This was a first time record long trip experience for me. After many difficult wind changes, and a problem
with a fan prop blade in Boise, Idaho we arrive three weeks later in Seattle. We landed on Microsoft
Corporation entrance lawn, can you believe.

     For all intents and purposes I was in the wonderful world of the famous alpha geek Entrepreneur, Bill Gates.

     After two weeks of indoctrination, I was given a job description of Chief Executive Facilitator and Public
Relations Director. My office was a few doors down from Bill’s.

     At the time Microsoft had a serious problem with the United States Justice Department. This was before
Microsoft spent money on lobbying. That came later, 900 million dollars on lobby money in 1996. The Justice Department claimed Microsoft had a ‘monopoly’ better known by the Geek Squad as a beta-mixer. You see, on the worldwide internet millions of civilians had to pay $19.99 a month to use the Microsoft windows operating system. And so, in the year of 1992, to no one’s surprise Bill was subpoenaed into a Justice Department hearing. The Justice Department’s lawyers, mainly the chief Prosecutor B. Sharp. Sharp was the same guy that lied and produced false evidence at President Clinton’s impeachment Monica Lewinski sex scandal hearings, discredited and no one has heard from since. Others in Congress raked Bill over the coals until you had to see it to believe it. The questions were asked one after another, after another. The hot air blowing around that hearing room was worse than a Texas tornado. The tech revolution of that era definitely had its share of mud-slinging. B.Sharp had made up his mind prior to the hearing, that’s for sure, break up MSFT. Split it down the middle. It had easily been done a decade ago with AT&T, and Standard Oil a century before, but AT&T and Standard Oil was not Bill Gates.

     Was there much sympathy for Microsoft? The answer is no! Most politicians, lawyers, and competitors
considered Bill and his windows operating system (DOS) a bad thing and him a bad person. They thought of him as another John D. Rockefeller or worse. Some were even heard to say, “Bill had outright stolen Windows when he slipped out the back door at IBM, his former employer."

It was a winner takes all and Gates made no plans for losing. It was red alert, full reconnaissance, take no
prisoners. On Bill’s behalf, I told the media and anyone else who would listen.

     “The whole situation, the Justice’s thing is totally unfair burro race, a simple case of political extortion. The
blankity blank Justice Department isn’t just, that is for certain.”

     In the meantime my life was a bed of roses. Yours would be too. Hundreds of us were suddenly
multimillionaires. Profits were doubling each year; money was no object, wages commissions, stock options,
a golden parachute, bonuses up, everything was going up. Gone was the Ogden days of drinking beer, begging for food stamps and welfare handouts. No more oppressive past-due duns in the mail, or hiding behind knocks on the door. Real money was coming in. The boom times were rolling, $100s, and $1,000 bills, not the $20s that spew out of ATMS into the hands of the rank and file. Real money and good whiskey. No more working under the table at the White Stallion Bar on Wall Ave.

     Additionally, I was now posing as a “Tree War Writer” (a tree war writer writes dancing baloney and useless animations used simply to impress clients). Tree war writers live in a rarefied organizational layer, they are above the regular employees. For example, I did dancing baloney for Lucent’s Tech Division in the advertising manuals department located on the Eastern Rim headquartered in Peking.

     Yes sir, I had left Ogden and my “404” mouse brain boyfriend, Mortimer Bolivar, left for good when I left Utah. Mortimer is a long haul truck driver, who works for Neil’s Trucking, transporting cars, trucks and wrecks headquartered in North Salt Lake City. Mortimer is short and of a talkative personality. He holds himself very stiff, straight, and upright as short people usually do, and is careless with his paychecks. In my mind, the whole time of our relationship, he was skating on thin ice. He showed no interest in Raskel. When he came to my apartment, it was on the spur of the moment, and only for a day or two at the most. He usually came on an urge for salsa chips, a twelve pack, TV football, and anything else he could get. What kind of a boy fiend is that? Sometimes, to top it off, the son of a gun would park his rig in the back alley and not come in at all, instead preferring to go drinking with his loser friends. If you were to add in his whiney conversation there decidedly was more bad than good.

     Were there any other changes in my life, like say, social? Sure, things had made a hundred and eighty
degree about face for me. I met a rich lawyer shortly after starting my new job, a barrister Mark Anthony IV. He would give Raskel five silver uncirculated dollars when he came to call. He usually came in a limousine and more often than not, whisk me off to dine at fancy restaurants, hotels and other places. Tony was tall, stood straight as an arrow. He was very handsome, and held a job paying a shade over two hundred thousand a year. He had gray matter between his ears. Life was heavenly.

     Back to business. The Justice Department put an injunction on Microsoft. Suddenly in need of
respectability, to try and win public and political support to Gates views, I would compromise with people. I
would present the positive aspect, which was the convergence of a worldwide internet that would interface
with any and all hardware for a minimal price. Bill’s vision was to give free e-mail, and movies or music for a
small server fee. Computers for all the people on and off the planet using one common system without curbs
or government intervention. Soft ware competition was often bought up, or sent on a ‘Salmon Run’ upstream
to die out in the end. Microsoft would continue to dominate if the politicians and lawyers would go where I
won’t say they belonged.

     Bill put me in charge of propitiating these elements. I enjoyed my job and the competition. My apartment was open for entertainment. I was friends with respectable executives like the CEO of Net Speak for
instance, a fierce competitor. Whereas Bill fulminated, I would present reasonable arguments for the Microsoft cause. I was making ten thousand clams a week and giving twenty plus speeches a month. My shrewdness was the talk of the town I heard say. I might find myself sitting at the dinner table next to an ego surfing phobic from a cube farm or maybe a chainsaw consultant brought in to reduce the employee headcount or someone bat Mobilling emotional shields. I might be surrounded by circles of the old nobility, who had been diminished, not killed by the fall of the Apple. They were all there at one time or another. Each filled a niche in the prairie dog era called ass kissing. They all came and went as most of them lost market share to Microsoft.

     But then my balloon started leaking slowly at first. Gates and his wife, Melinda, left to be philanthropic (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and with them went 30 billion MSFT stock. The foundation became the worlds largest private philanthropy.

     Steve Ballinger took over as CEO all by himself. And worse yet he inherited Bills 12,000 legal men, and asany sane person knows anything bad that can happen with just one lawyer will, let alone 12,000.

     The housing bubble of ‘07 came second. The lenders foreclosed on my condo. I lost my 500K down
payment. Next, the stock market went “South.” I lost my leveraged stock holdings first, big holdings in stockslike LU fiber optics at $80 a share, were taken off the market too as it slipped into penny stock, and then it was sent to the delisted junk bond market. My Microsoft stock at $140 a share took a nose dive to $20. I couldn’t cover my margin and it went by the wayside. Federal Reserve was plastering the streets with trillions of dollars of useless paper dollars which cut the value of a dollar down the middle.

     You can see the natural result. I was broke, and rifted. Hopelessly, I climbed aboard ‘Midnight’ with little more than little innocent Raskel. and left Seattle, The Japanese tail wind pushed us south South East, bobbing
us along the skyline past strip malls, into Oregon, Idaho, over the City of Rocks, the desert, across the Great Salt Lake, into Ogden, over the Semi-Truck in the alley. I was back to square one, generic America.

     I turned the propane off, and ‘Midnight’ softly landed at the 50 yard line, her last descent, worn out and
useless after 600 plus air time hours. I wonder if the White Stallion could use a good bar maid.