Free Chapter: The Network That Never Was

In late 2007, I'd bottomed out.  I had just escaped a PhD with Lyme disease: she'd kept me locked up in what she claimed was her condo for two weeks, only to let me out for work and her assorted sketchy charity trips.  Between bouts of fatigue or extreme paranoia, she was still an extraordinarily kind and considerate person.  I still remember a flawless meal she'd made for me, with a perfect russet pear and excellent red wine.

Little did I know I'd be repeating most of the situation in a few short months.

In the meantime, I was living in a boarding house by a Navy shipyard, with just my computer, alarm clock, router, and some clothing, until Yelena's perceived enemies could relent enough to let me pick up my belongings.  My friend Andrew had brought me there with the approval of the owner, a man all Navy and all business beneath a civilian veneer.  Tim was always fighting the inexorable creep of tenant laziness and erosive habits, so I got the typical welcome when I settled in with my minimalist bundle.  No females after 10.  Leave dirty laundry in a bag.  Place old sheets outside the door every Wednesday morning or I wouldn't get new ones for a week.  NO SMOKING IN BED.  It was basic, and agreeable.

There was an overall decency among the tenants.  Pilfering was kept down to common areas where victims lacked common sense.  Smoking was an affliction of the working, self-educated poor.  We had bowls and bowls of cigarette butts on the second story landing, with a curled yellowed sheet of paper bellowing not to hold doors open with wires.  The smoke would seep under my door, so I would leave the windows open in the late autumn nights until I had to go to sleep.  A towel helped in winter.

While I waited for Yelena's invisible enemies to spare her the time to call me, I studied JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, and HTML at w3Schools.  A break had come through a local temp engineering company, where a departing recruiter was dazzled by a few lines of PHP ("Hi, GEORGE") and arranged an interview for me.

I smelled the hoity and the toity when Justine Launders called me.  Her voice shone and rang with sunshine, pewter, fine china, and je ne sais quoi.  I should have noticed the piss and vinegar too, but I was dazzled by her requirements.  eBay guy? Check.  Speaking skills? Yes.  Writing? Yes.  Driving skills? Check.  PHP? MySQL? She called it "My sequel".  I chafed at the pronunciation but said nothing: I tasted money, for a change.  Could I come by a small town in New Hampshire with the tricky directions she was about to bestow upon me? Oh, yes.  Please, do.

In a few days, I found myself in the back office of an antique store.  I had my best salesman vibe on.  I answered Justine’s questions sharply without being a show-off.  I was dressed well with what clothes I’d salvaged from my stay at Yelena’s.  Cool air through a window felt good.  A few summers ago I had baked through an accounting interview wearing a sweater over a shirt I’d spattered sauce on.  How different, today.

Her husband Dieter was an urbane man in his fifties.  He might have fancied himself a colonial dandy the way he cut his curling white-gray hair and wore spectacles.  All he needed was a muzzle loader and some fancier duds.  He stood while Justine sat.  Every so often he would gasp a little.  Later I would learn why.

And sat she did, like she owned the place.  She was in her element.  I looked above her from time to time.  She had a hazy 1890s painting of a Biblical scene, the one where the lion would lie down with the lamb.  The focus wasn’t on the animals, but on the little girl who would lead them.  Like Justine, she was stout and blond.  The girl was holding a switch.  It was a red flag, but a vague one I didn’t ponder until later.

Her business books were fairly impressive.  Trump, eBay, real estate, some of Dieter’s medical books.  A few Dummies books on the lower shelves.

My first impression of her was complex.  She had the jovial bulk of a cat from an old children’s book, but her expression was toad-like no matter her jolly diction, and her eyes... they focused on two spots in the room, no matter how close she brought them together.  She was whip-sharp, which made her appearance confusing.  I liked her.  She was energetic, focused, and appreciative of what I had to offer.

We talked a few more minutes about how I would fit in, and then we talked about The Project.

It was amazing in its scope, just a little insane around its edges.

Justine had hand-picked 1200 websites that ended up in the same suffix: wowzers.com.

Carswowzers.com.  Diamondswowzers.com.  Petswowzers.com.  Every country name plus wowzers, every retail category, branch of the disciplines, every stage of life.  Just add wowzers.

Her banker liked the math.  Three dollars in revenue per site per day meant $3600 a day.  Times 365 (366 for leap years, she cackled), that was over a million a year.  But she wanted more, much more.  $30 a website per day: ten million dollars a year.  At $300 per site, she could afford to offer me a million dollars.

So she did.

I’d been through a couple of shady operations before, working months with little or no pay: real estate, pizza delivery, drawing up a racing proposal for a has-been legend and terminally ill con artist on Windows 98.  She assured me that I’d be drawing a salary on top of the $1 mil incentive, starting at $500 a week once things went underway.

I was bowled over, and accepted.

She got my social security number, we signed a non-disclosure contract, and left with cheery intentions and tip-top morale.

Things got better as December rolled around.  My old supermarket job was becoming a memory, and I got two checks, just for continuing to study PHP.  I had $500 for rent.  I was thrilled.

Justine and Dieter were silent for a week.  I continued to spend the money slowly, enjoying breakfast at the local greasy spoon, and going for coffee, but nothing more.

Then, one snowflake-wrapped night, I got a frantic call.  They were in crisis mode, so they’d talk to me later.  They told me $1000 was on its way.  I couldn’t believe it.  I’d been in such a financial crush because of my douchey ex and a Lyme disease-crazed woman who scammed me into two weeks of being locked in her unhappy landlord's condo.  Now I had peace of mind and the ultimate career.

A few days later, they let me take a peek in the guts of their mighty web project.  They were using a very popular but arcane hosting platform.  I tried playing around with one of their title pages.  It was in a yawny yellow-green color scheme that reminded me of expectoration and old people and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  I saved all the code, and tried adjusting some picayune little detail, but wound up calling the company a few times to restore it.  Justine and Dieter were going to be angry at me.  I was panicked.  A lot of times I had sabotaged my own efforts in the past; this was going to unintentionally be the same.  I wanted so badly to work in harmony with these nice people, to help them get their web project on its way, and to be a web professional.

I penned out an apology, then grabbed a beer and went out for a walk.  I got a phone call.

It was Justine.  We were too early into our working relationship to be at each other’s throats, but the way she was so restrained, I wish she had been.  Her voice was tight and flat, full of Ivy League diction.  What had happened to the animals website? Why had the company gotten so many calls?

All I could tell her was that I was new to the system.  I couldn’t tell her her thousand-dollar cloud hosting contract sucked; I felt bound to the money she was sending, and figured she must have known enough of the big picture to do it that way.

Eventually, she drew her claws back.  She hadn’t cut me, but I knew what was glistening, ready for use, on the other end of the phone.  It was an unsettling experience, because I thought I had been able to communicate with her and that we both had enough technical skills to work through such a tiny glitch.  She relented and became Justine the Benevolent again.  We both agreed that I’d wait until I’d moved in above the antique store, so I could work supervised.  

I had a decent, if functional, Christmas.   My brother picked me up and brought me to his office, where we played video games.  I told him how great the project was, how much money I’d be able to make, how nice and decent Justine and Dieter were.

New Year’s Day came, and as I had no car, I swept the holiday under the rug at my parents’ house.  I felt bad that I couldn’t go out, but I had bigger things to worry about.  Justine wouldn’t have liked me drunk, anyway.  I figured she’d be putting me through my paces a good bit more soon, and that I should be ready.

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1500 Websites, 2 Dodgy Bosses, Half A Brain.

Have you worked for a horrible boss? Not just some mildly unpleasant bastard, but someone who curdles the very coffee and donut in your stomach?

Hello. My name is Leo Heinrich. In a small town in New Hampshire lies the skeleton of a secret. There, two old people are living out the last of their lives, knowing they had a chance to launch an Internet leviathan. Their names: Justine and Dieter Launders.

Who were they? Well-to-do people, that is true. They'd gathered a moderate fortune in real estate and antique sales, and slowly converted it into online treasure: Wowzers.

No, I'm not saying "Wowzers, they had a lot of money."

They bought 1500 sites ending in "wowzers". Financialwowzers. Jewelrywowzers. Carswowzers. Diamondwowzers. Every country name you can think of, just add wowzers.

Yeah, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it? That's what I told them. But they smiled, and wrote me out a check for $1000.00. Then I quit my job, moved to their town, and made Internet history.

But this isn't a rags-to-riches story.

Remember that part about nasty bosses?

Think of this more as a rags-to-bitches story. I wore the rags, and worked with bitches.

Here's my story. Please share it if you can. Thank you for reading.

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