Lucky for me, I didn’t have to do it – I ran the Remedy system that the help desk used. According to the help desk’s supervisor, though, the end users were older than average, and whatever website they were trying to reach often turned out to be porn.
But I did have to deal with Netpliance staff and I can’t say it was pleasant (they probably wouldn’t have good things to say about me, either).
And I just remembered ConnectSouth Internet (in Austin). A substantial number of my coworkers left to go work there. Pretty soon I was getting calls at home from them, about coming to work there. It turns out that one of our former managers had put a bounty on my head, so to speak, to recruit me to the new company. I stayed put, because I’m lazy and/or set in my ways. A few months later, ConnectSouth went belly-up and a bunch of the employees came back to their old jobs.
ETA:
At the other job I had (the one where we faked employment for the tour), after things had wound down but before they shut down completely, I found everyone’s public trust clearance paperwork in an unlocked file cabinet.
I don’t remember, but maybe they wanted the Digital and Altavista assets that came with it? And now I can’t remember HP’s product that we used for network monitoring and discovery… (EDIT: It was OpenView.)
I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. It’s almost certainly tax fraud (not paying income tax on money used for personal expenses) and very likely also defrauding investors (though, in the grand scheme of all the ways she defrauded investors, this is probably a footnote. )
People who aren’t friends with lots of bigwig politicians would go to jail for something like that.
I lived in Austin during the last couple of years of the dot-com bubble. What a freaking insane roller coaster ride. Companies doing IPOs for hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, despite the fact they had 0 actual products, their “plan” said they would pay for everything from the revenues they got from advertisements on the web, everyone below C level working for minimum wage and stock options, and everyone convinced they would be millionaires by next month and spending like drunken sailors on their last shore leave before sailing into battle. And at least 85% of it was !@#$ that sober people knew was unworkable but the people who knew how to trick the stock market kept the hysteria whipped up and made a killing. It was a time when the sharks chummed the fishermen.
Humans are pack animals who have a genetically hardwired instinct to look up to a leader. Being able to actually think (some people) (sort of), humans need to rationalize that instinct. Otherwise they’d have to think there’s something wrong with themselves for knee-jerk admiration of sociopaths, and that would be too painful.
It’s a human thing, not a uniquely American thing. In Europe, substitute “royalty” or “peerage” for “CEO.” Same problem, same reason, just different focus.
I’m pretty sure my very good friend worked for them, as did at least two of my koop coworkers. If it’s the company I’m thinking of, there was some real funny business going on with the executives. You could search their corporate website and find porn, for instance. It wasn’t findable through regular navigation or sitemap, but it was searchable.
At least that brings us back on topic! I had not heard about that.
I’m fairly certain that was the carrot dangled toward me from ConnectSouth.
It’s also around the time that (1) housing prices started to really go up in Austin (more than they had been, if not as high as they’ve since reached) and (2) Antiques Roadshow got real popular. I thought it would be great to combine the two, have Antiques Roadshow assess these cottages that were suddenly worth half a million and being sold within hours (if that), sight unseen:
“Well it’s a very small house, isn’t it? For how much were you hoping to sell it?”
“Half a million.”
“Dollars!?” (drops monocle)
I left Austin in 2002 so I’m not sure whether the prices busted and came back up, or had just stayed there since 2000 or so… I was in my 1-bedroom duplex for so long that the landlord made only incremental increases in the rent. I paid $405/month in 1994, and it was $495 when I moved out 8 years later. Duplex is still there, now remodeled, and I’d have to guess that it rents for at least twice that now.
With the assumption that most don’t want to go to prison. If it was a scam from day-one, I wonder what their exit plan was? They knew they would eventually have to show results to the investors.
This is encouraging, as my project is exactly the opposite of all of those things. My office is a shithole. And we’ve got one investor who is worth in the mid 100MMs, and he loves our office – because it’s a complete shithole.
I had not heard about that.