A happy memory

I've been very busy with meetings and sending out my resume lately, so I haven't had time to deal with the colleagues that usually give me new material. Not wanting to keep my audience waiting, I've decided to pull another classic from the archives.

As has been documented, I've been the "go-to" guy for computer stuff since very early on in my career. My usefulness in this regard has dwindled in recent years, as my company has gotten younger and more and more of my peers have grown up around technology the same way I have. I'll always have a few peeps whose obliviousness will help keep the coffers full, but I sincerely doubt we'll ever approach the levels we saw during the glory days. When I first started, the senior management was literally "senior" - there wasn't a one under 50 (for a guy in his early 20s at the time, that's pretty damn old). Despite being intelligent and successful, these fuckers didn't know a keyboard from a keychain and for that I'm eternally grateful.

There was one higher-up in particular who was always good for a laugh. Like me, he was in early every day, and more often than not, I'd have to provide some sort of tech support for this dude before anyone else got to the office. About a year and a half into my tenure, he discovered that you could put your stocks into some sort of thingie on the Internet and see the quotes all at once (this is how he described it to me after being enlightened by his broker). Knowing that anything more than the most absolute basic portfolio would cause me unbearable pain (in hindsight, it would have also given me great material), I set him up with a Yahoo! finance account and put his portfolio together for him. I even bookmarked it for him, so he could come in and see his portfolio in a single click, rather than going through the yahoo homepage. I set it to keep him logged in and explained that he may, from time to time, have to re-enter his info to access his personal finance page (it made him feel special) and stuck a Post-It with the login details on his monitor. He was appreciative, and fascinated beyond belief.

I was happy to have helped one of my elders with something that he'd never have gotten on his own, and really felt like I taught him something...until the next morning.

I got a call, about 5 minutes after he got in (he was afraid he'd forget his password and be locked out of his computer, so he never shut it down) telling me that his stocks were gone and asking me to work my "technical wizardry" (a favorite saying of his, complete with freaky wiggle of the fingers as if he's trying to cast a spell). I asked him if he was clicking on the bookmark and he stared at me blankly. I then asked how he was trying to get to his portfolio and he told me he was trying to go to the Yahoo Finance address. I was impressed, but also figured I knew the problem. I asked him what the address was (at the time, it was finance.yahoo.com) and he told me it was wwww.yahoofinance.com (the fourth "w" is not a typo...that's actually what he told me, and what was typed in the address bar). I corrected him, re-explained the bookmark concept and all was well again (for a few hours, before he screwed up Microsoft Word...another story for another time).

We repeated this exercise, almost to the word, 4 days a week for the better part of the next 2 months. I bookmarked it for him almost every time and, by the end, he had about 28 bookmarks pointing to Yahoo Finance in his favorites folder. I even tried putting a shortcut on his desktop, telling him to click the special picture (icon) when he wanted to look at his portfolio. That lasted less than a day, as he clicked that for his browser and complained that the "Internet thing" was taking him to his stocks when he wanted to look at something else.

This guy was "asked to leave" eventually and went on to start his own company, which ended up being pretty successful. During the early days of his new life, he tried to recruit me.
He offered me much more money than I was worth at the time and threw in an equity position in the company. Tempting as it was, I just couldn't do it...the thought of my boss wiggling his fingers at me asking me to perform "technical wizardry" every day while I'm helping him find the Internet (another of his favorites..."I lost the Internet") was just too painful to consider.

I made my decision and I stand by it.

Ahhhh...the good old days.