eGo

A Dot-com Bubble Story

by Ed SJC Park

Copyright © 2012 by Ed Park

All rights reserved.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: 2012

ISBN 978-1-105-87027-9

Dedicated to

Beverly B, Debbie, Laura, Annie, Erin, Julio O, Sebastian M, Brad D, and the 1990’s

Chapter 1: Having a Future

After graduating from Stanford in 1994, I found myself unemployed.  My smarter classmates were all going off to grad school.  I moved to San Francisco in the midst of California’s big, fat recession.  I languished there from one temp job to another.  My specialty had become data entry.  Having spent a summer interning at the business school entering data, it was my only real job skill.  My Economics major was about as impressive to employers as was my interest in writing novels.  I did actually land one nice job, but it was only temporary.  In 1998 and almost traumatized by four years of disappointment and failure, a friend of mine moved to Reno and suggested that I move there in search of work.  Nevada’s economy was doing much better than California’s.  Reno opened a major casino, the Silver Legacy in 1995 and people were still gambling. 

I always considered myself a rather intelligent person.  My high SAT scores could attest to that, but one of my coworkers once told me that I was too smart for my own good.  I never really understood that observation until I thought about it more for several years.  I think he meant that I tend to over-analyze and over-think things.  You can be book smart and have utterly no common sense or savvy.  In college and through much of schooling, you are taught that the one who gets the highest grades is the best student.  It’s as simple as that.  If you want to be the best student, you get the highest grades, and then the valedictorian and cum laude’s are like the gods of academia.  Well, in the real world, the best employee is not the one who has the best marks in college and gets the job done fastest or best.  Actually, even in school, you can be the best student and also the worst kid in school as far as popularity.  However, in the real world, the work world, you can be the best worker and still get fired or passed up for promotion to worse employees who happen to be more popular.  This is the one big lesson you just don’t learn in school.  Another big lesson is that you don’t have to do your job perfectly.  In school, you cross all your t’s and dot all your i’s and if you hand in a research paper, it has to be perfect: no sloppy reasoning, analysis, or research methodologies.  In the real world, it’s all about what works well enough, and time and price are critical factors.  There’s a reason there are auto repair shops.  You’re not buying perfect products.

Fact is, I was a really good, hardworking, fast, efficient, and smart worker who could always analyze the job and come up with a hundred better ways of doing everything, but in reality, I was just some obnoxious, annoying, nerd who wasn’t popular and never got hired or promoted.  Fitting in is a big part of career success and getting along with your boss is even bigger.  I never much cared for most of my bosses who tended to be less educated, less intellectual, and less idea-oriented.  Of course, this is all hindsight.  Back then, I just blamed everyone and everything for my misfortunes.

My life, however, turned around when I moved to Reno.  I started out taking temp jobs like in San Francisco, but just a few months in, I interviewed for a full-time permanent job with a battery supply company called Full Charge.  At first, I just imagined that they sold car batteries, but as it turned out, they sold all types of batteries mostly for small electronic devices and cell phones.  They considered themselves a high-tech company, but I considered them a simple catalogue supply business.  They were based in San Francisco interestingly, but they were moving their entire operations to Reno.  They would train me for a month in San Francisco and then I’d work in their Reno office.

Full Charge set up their interviews at two locations.  The first was their new office and warehouse in Northwest Reno.  I had just moved to Reno, so it was an all new area for me, sparsely populated.  People in Reno today would not recognize the old Northwest Reno.  There were only two apartment complexes out there compared to today where they dominate the entire area.  There wasn’t even any bus service out there.  Yeah, I had become so broke I was living in a weekly motel and couldn’t afford a car.  So I took a taxi out there. 

There was a front office attached to a large warehouse.  I sat in the lobby area, and I immediately noticed a very busty, hot blonde sitting there too.  Naturally, I started small talk with her.  She was a local looking for one of their customer service rep jobs.  I felt sort of stupid telling her I was looking into their data entry jobs.  I probably would have felt even worse if she had seen me taking a cab.  She walked in for the interview.  Later on, I was interviewed by an old guy named Terri.  He was a nerdy type who seemed distracted and a bit confused.  He wore bifocals and whenever he looked at me, he’d lower his head so he could see over the top part of the bifocals.

Stanford?  His eyes widened.  You were only there three years though.

Yeah, I took summer classes and graduated a year early.

Impressive!

I didn’t put down my GPA or anything.  I actually graduated with a B- average.  I wasn’t a genius who graduated in three years because I was so smart.  I was just tired of Economics and studying and wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.  I took easy elective classes over the summer like literature, philosophy, color, and acting. 

Temp agencies, he noted.

I wanted to apologize.  I knew what he was thinking.  Why would a guy who graduated from Stanford in three years spend the next four years temping, and not temping like accounting or finance, but temping data entry at $8/hour?

The economy’s been tough.  I’ve just taken work where I can find it.

Yeah, sure, sure.  Don’t you think you can find something better?  Something in a management training program, financial analysis, an entry level financial position maybe.

I put out resumes all over the Bay area.  Just haven’t made much progress there.  I’d love to take a management training program, some entry level financial analysis.  Honestly, I’m not sure why, but I never really did try.  I was offered a Wall Street stock broker job, but they told me I’d have to pass some exam, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend any more time studying.  I guess I needed a mental break.  Stuffing four years of college into three years had pushed me a bit much, and I almost had a nervous breakdown my last year in college.  I was lost.  I thought I wanted to become this big corporate business tycoon and make loads of money, but I couldn’t stand accounting and finance.  I couldn’t stand rules and memorizing rules and following rules.  I spent most of my time focusing on my literature, philosophy, and psychology classes.  They fascinated me a billion times more.  They told me about the important things in life: people, relationships, behavior, thoughts, existence, life, reality.  Finance and Accounting told me nothing about these things.  It was all a bunch of bullshit rules to memorize, and at the end of the day, all you had was a better understanding of the rules.  You didn’t know anything more about life, your life, yourself, others, reality, people, how people work, how you work, think.  I wanted to know all that shit.  I didn’t want to know how to balance a fucking balance sheet or amortize a stupid loan.  I thought about it a lot.  Maybe it was my mother who was so psychotic it made me wonder what life was all about and why people went crazy.  She also had all these stupid rules that made no sense, and she was never consistent about them, and she often punished me out of anger more than anything else.  Naturally, I just grew up to despise rules and those who enforced them.  Was this why I flunked out of Finance and Accounting?

I studied Economics, because I thought it would teach me about the real world, real economies, real countries, economic development, policies.  All I studied were endless fucking calculus formulas and graphs.  It was beyond abstract.  In one class, we spent the entire class breaking apart a foreign exchange interest formula and then putting it all back together again.  That was it.  I felt like a fucking computer could do it.  Is this why I was put on this planet?  To be a fucking computer, to eat numbers, pass them through an intestinal algorithm, and shit them out my ass?  You know there are infinite points in a curve, no, infinite fucking boredom.  I wanted meaning and substance.  I wanted what you got when you put all the boring infinite points together.  All I had was number crunching.  Then I guess the most horrific irony of all was how I spent the next four years doing nothing but number crunching as a data entry clerk bored out of my fucking mind, but not being paid $50K a year but $8 fucking dollars an hour.  When coworkers asked me if I went to college, I used to tell them Stanford, and they’d look at me real funny.  I quickly learned to tell them community college.  Not one of them was a college grad.

Terri came across as a warm and caring guy.  And when he told me that he felt I was over-qualified for a data entry clerk, he did it like he really cared about me, not like he worried that I’d get bored and quit after a few weeks and cost the company money in training hours. 

Well, I’ve done it the last four years.  I can handle it.  When the economy turns around, I might look for something else, but I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it.  I type 70 words per minute and ten key 15,000.  I was really fast, too fast.  Temp agencies actually didn’t like me, because they’d send me out to do a four week assignment, and I’d be done in less than two weeks.  They didn’t give a fuck if I was fast and efficient for the client.  They lost over two weeks of income.  They fucking hated me.  They’d send me out on one day assignments, and I’d be done by lunch.  They fucking hated me and gave better assignments to slower idiots with GED’s.

Most people would go nuts keying in a string of numbers in a dozen different fields all day long, but I was able to allow my mind to wander, to think, imagine, fantasize, day dream.  I thought up all sorts of things from new novels to screenplays and remembering moments from my past in San Francisco, college, high school.  I’d think about daily news, politics, current affairs, scandals, celebrities, sports.  My mind was constantly on.  I couldn’t stop thinking.  The only time I ever stop thinking is when I’m sleeping or drunk, but even then, fuck I think in my dreams, I think about stupid stuff when I’m drunk.  I listen to songs like, Bad Moon Rising, and I’m thinking, fucking-a, they’re singing about the end of the world.

Well, we are a fast growing company, and there will be opportunities for advancement.  Okay, I think this may work.  We’re the kind of company that strives to be the best, and we hire the best too.  Probably all of our employees are overqualified.  We’re a very ambitious, fast-paced company.  Do you think you can handle that?

I think I’d be bored otherwise.

He smiled. 

Okay, there’s a second set of interviews where you’ll get to meet the company’s owner and two other people.  It’s at the Reno Hilton, not the Flamingo Hilton downtown, but the one by the airport.  I’ll set up an interview for you for tomorrow.

I wasn’t sure why there were two interviews for a stupid data entry position, but I wasn’t complaining.  Terri seemed to genuinely like me and probably would put in a good word for me.  The next day, I went to the Hilton.  It was a bit intimidating.  There were two guys and a very attractive woman.  They were all tall and wore black suits.  They looked very professional.  Terri looked more casual and warm.  These guys looked like they worked on the Death Star alongside Darth Vader.  It was also considerably darker in the convention room which also created a more formal, serious air. 

The owner, Sam Thompson, came across as a bit disinterested and aloof.  He kept leaning back and resting his arms behind his head.  I read a book on body language in college, and this was a typical exaggerated display of dominance.  Basically, he was exposing his armpits, airing them out, tainting the air with his body odor, marking his territory.  Also, by leaning back, he was looking down at me.  You look down on someone when you are taller which often means older.  I wasn’t impressed by him, but he was impressed by the fact that I had graduated from Stanford.  He never mentioned anything about me being overqualified or anything.  It was a short interview, and I went to the next guy.

The next guy was Stephen.  He was not only tall but muscular and huge.  He looked like a bouncer.  He came across as a lot warmer and nicer.  He was one of those big, soft, cuddly bears like John Wilkos on Jerry Springer.  It was easy talking to him, and he too didn’t mention anything about me being over-qualified.  In fact, as it turned out, he used to play college baseball and