A MICROSOFT BALOON RIDE
"Life Is Not Measured By The Number Of
Breaths We Take, But By The Moments That Take Our Breath Away” George Carlin
Right now
you’re reading a story, I’ve written, as told to me by a woman by the name of
Dona (Cookie) Miller, a pleasant lady.
“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 University football field. I unloaded
my car in preparation for my balloon trip to Seattle. I drove back to my apartment,
parked my car in the back yard. I woke up my teenage son, Raskel, called a taxi
and was driven back to the Weber State University football field. The sun was
peeking over Mount Ogden.
We placed our
belongings in the gondola and climbed aboard. A quick blast of propane (100
million British Thermal Units), and the balloon launched upward. ‘Midnight Blue’ extended herself eight
stories top to bottom, and began silently moving west North West toward our destination
Micro-Soft Seattle. As the ground grew farther away, two excited individuals
were having their first long trip balloon experience. After many difficult wind
changes and a problem with a fan prop-blade in Boise, we arrived in Seattle. two
weeks later We landed on Microsoft Corporation .publics entrance lawn.
For all
intents and purposes, I was in the wonderful world of the famous alpha geek entrepreneur,
Bill Gates. I first met Gates in his plainly decorated office located huge
building outside of Seattle. He is generally known as the 38 year old youthful
wonder boy of the computer industry. As we visited, he rocked up and down in a
fame chair. His sentences were filled with words…like stuff, things, and neat. There
were some signs of middle age and a bit of fading of his trademark red hair,
undoubtedly caused by the problems the Justice Department was causing. After two weeks of
indoctrination, I was given a job description of Chief Executive Facilitator;
Public Relations Director; Data mining spam and viruses.
My office was two doors down from Bill’s.
Microsoft was having a serious problem with the United States Justice
Department. This was before Microsoft spent bazillions of money lobbying. That
came later. The so called 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 people paid $19.99 a month to use the Microsoft windows
operating system. In the year of 1992, Bill was subpoenaed to a Justice
Department hearing. The Justice Department’s lawyer chief Prosecutor Robert
Sharp, the same person that lied and produced false evidence at President
Clinton’s impeachment Monica Lewinski sex scandal hearings. He was later
discredited by Clinton and Gates. No one has heard from him since. President
Clinton has often said, “He’s the only person I have ever disliked.”
Back to my
story: There were Congressmen who raked Bill over the coals. You had to see it
to believe it. The questions were asked one after another, after another
shotgun style. The hot air blowing around the hearing room was worse than a
Texas tornado. The Tech revolution of that era definitely had its share of
mud-slinging. Prosecutor Sharp had made
up his mind prior to the hearing to break up M.S. split it down the middle so
to speak into two companies. In years gone by the Justice Department had easily
managed to split up giants like AT&T, and Standard Oil.
AT&T and Standard Oil wasn’t Bill
Gates. Bill made no plans for recapitulation.
Was there
much sympathy for Microsoft? The answer is not much. Most politicians, lawyers,
and competitors considered Bill and his windows operating system (DOS) a bad
thing. They thought of Bill as another John D. 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 winner
take all, full reconnaissance, take no prisoners. On Bill’s behalf, I told the
media and everyone else, the unabridged truth; that the Justice’s thing is
totally unfair-burro racism, and a serious case of political extortion. The
blankityblank J.D. isn’t just, that is as certain as night follows day.
In the while,
my life was a bed of roses. Yours would be too. Suddenly a multimillionaire.
Profits were doubling each year, money, CRISPY money, commissions, stock options,
golden parachutes, bonuses, up, all of it going up like a balloon.
Long gone were
my Ogden days begging for food stamps, welfare handouts, oppressive duns,
hiding behind knocks on my door. Real money was coming in. The boom times were
rolling, $100s, $1,000s, not the $20s that spew out of ATMS into the hands of
the blue collar. Real money, good whiskey; no more working under the table at
the “Co-co-mo.” on Ogden’s Two Bit Street.
I was posing
as a “Tree War Writer” A tree war writer writes dancing baloney and useless
Animations that are used simply to impress clients. Tree war writers live in a
rarefied organizational layer. We are high above blue color. For example, I did
dancing baloney for Lucent’s Tech Division in the advertising manuals
department, located on the Eastern Rim headquartered in Peking. And get this a
Cadillac I bought I thought was American, but when I called State Farm to get
it towed, because of a flat tire, I found out it was built in Mexico by a
company owned by a company in Europe with a warehouse full of parts from China.
When I complained about the long wait for the tow truck, I was transferred to a
call center in India.
Any way you look
at it Bill is America’s richest man even today... His face has graced
magazines, newspaper, talk shows and he’s had a best-selling book. His business
is computer software, and his company produces the programs that run 80% of the
world’s 550 million personal computers.
Yes sir, I had
left Ogden and my 404 (mouse brain) boyfriend, Mortimer Bolivar, left him
behind for good the minute I left Utah. Mortimer is a long haul truck driver.
He works for “Neil Trucking,” headquartered in North Salt Lake City,
transporters of cars, trucks and wrecks. Mortimer is short and has a talkative
personality. He holds himself very stiff, upright as an arrow as short people
usually do, and is careless with his paychecks. He was skating on thin ice the
whole time of our relationship. He showed no interest in my son Rascal. When he
came to my apartment, it was always on the spur of the moment, and stayed for a
day or two at the most. He came for salsa chips, popcorn, beer, TV sports, and
anything else he could get. What kind of
a boy fiend is that? To top it off, the son of a gun, would usually park his
rig in the back alley and not come in at all, instead preferring to go drinking
with his loser friends. If you add in his whiney conversation, there is
decidedly more BAD THAN GOOD.
Were there any
other changes in my life, like say, social? You bet, a hundred and eighty
degree about face. I met a rich lawyer after starting my job, a barrister by
the name of Mark Anthony IV. He would give Rascal five silver uncirculated
dollars whenever he came to call. We ate at fancy restaurants, hotels and other
places. Mark was tall, handsome, and held a job paying a shade over 2k a year.
He had gray matter between his ears. Life was heavenly.
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. Software 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. 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 sit 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 MO
billing emotional shields or surrounded by circles of the old nobility, who had
been diminished, or killed by the fall of 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 world’s largest private philanthropy. Steve Ballinger
took over as CEO all by himself. And worse yet he inherited Bills 12,000 legal
men. As EVERYONE KNOWS, every bad will happen with one lawyer, 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 like LU fiber optics at $80 a share, was taken off
the stock exchange, as it nose-dived into 4 cents a share, then penny stock,
then to the junk bond market. All my
Microsoft stock was $140 a share took a dive to $20 in a short time, and as I
couldn’t cover my margin and it went by the wayside.
The
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 guess
the natural result. I was broke. Hopelessly, I climbed aboard ‘Midnight’ with
little more than my innocent son Rascal. The Japanese tail wind pushed Big Blue
SSE, bobbing us along the skyline past strip malls, into Oregon, Idaho, over
the City of Rocks, across the Great Salt Lake, into Ogden, over Mortimer’s
Semi-Truck parked in the alley.
I was back to
square one, generic America. I turned the propane off, ‘Midnight’ landed on the
50 yard line, her last descent, worn out and useless. I wondered if the
Co-co-mo. could use a bar maid paid under the table?
THE
END
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.
To read more of my writings go to: w.w.w.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment