It’s kind of sad the way the dot com thing panned out.
A while back I saw Startup.com – the movie. Now I didn’t sympathize with the spotlight company of this documentary. Regardless of how many angel investors you have, you don’t drop $800,000 on your office furniture before building your own Web site. But it captured the feeling of "anything is possible" -- the atmosphere of 20-year-olds suddenly making 4 times what their parents earned last year, all because of lines of code they learned to string together while drinking too much coffee and listening to Underworld all night.
Everyone started reading Wired. Even laymen knew what a URL was. I started working at a dot com in 1999, just when things hit fever pitch and a few months before the whole bottom fell out. It was an exciting drop, like jumping in on the crest of the wave of pink slips and riding it all the way down to crash on the beach with a mouthful of sand and four employees’ worth of work added to your board.
I don’t know how everyone thought that the Internet economy would keep growing and growing. Eventually it would have to hit critical mass. But there were so many kids made millionaires over night. And everyone was an ostrich in the sand with their skater-pant clad asses in the air.
I was just thinking about this because the company I’m temping at today must have gone through a nose dive a while back. The office feels like a party when that handful of guests that always stay too long just won’t leave and let you go to bed. It’s almost embarrassing. The echoes of days past ring off the walls whose Anime posters, dartboards, and Cold Fusion ads are curling at the corners and growing dust. The former beer fridge, recovering from previous days of all-nighters and Friday celebrations, now houses single-serving non-dairy creamers for the stream of visitors surveying the building for possible purchase.
This is the kind of company where the phone list is in alphabetical order by first name. The bulletin board features photographs of the mascot in a dozen different foreign lands, but the employees proudly wielding the camera and the stuffed dog now collect unemployment. There is a sea of silent cubicles – fifty or more. The mailroom where I was sorting envelopes had only a fraction of the former names – the rest had been peeled off sloppily as employee after employee received their layoff notices from within and exited the building for the last time.
It does make me sad. An era is over. I’m glad I got to experience it though. Our kids and grandkids will ask us to retell stories of how when we were in grade school, the Web didn't exist. It will be in history text books for years to come, like the 20’s, the Great Depression, the Industrial Revolution, Woodstock.
Woodstock? God. How did that get in there?
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