A MICROSOFT BALOON RIDE continued......short story

                                                  

                                                  A MICROSOFT BALOON RIDE

         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, in my own words near as I can remember.

       HER: 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, Raskal, 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, 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. 

continued from yesterday .To read more of my writings go to: .w.w.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com  

   

     Any way you look at it Bill is America’s richest man. His face has graced magazines, newspaper, talk shows and a best-selling book. His business is computer software, and his company produces the programs that run 80% of the world’s 450 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. 

Back to the Justice Department which 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. 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 any sane person knows, anything bad will happen with just 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 at $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.                                       

To be continued tomorrow...