December 4, 2001
  chapter end

I had stories for you all. Marvelous, hilarious, twisted stories.

Unfortunately, I forgot them all in my recent brain trauma. So sorry. Perhaps another time?

As part of my ongoing, losing battle with the assembled microbes of Redwood City, I've been bedridden for most of the past week. On Tuesday, it was a chill and a sniffle. On Wednesday morning, it was an hour-long conversation with a small nail I found in a wall, followed by a serenade of the first four notes of the theme song from Disney's 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'

I made it out of the house by Sunday, part of a short jaunt to Costco to buy toilet paper. The Guy drove me home after that and packed me on the sofa with a blanket, shivering, while he made dinner. Don't ask me how I spent the hours in between going home early on Tuesday and heading out to Costco on Sunday, because I honestly couldn't tell you. In fact, I'm still not sure I survived those hours; I'm fairly certain that any in-depth medical examination would reveal that I'm a corpse neatly stitched back together by a team of crack scientists for the purposes of research into the viability of rehabilitation of the dead.

Incidentally: boyfriends are good. They do good things. Take care of sick girlfriends, for instance. Cook them things. Cover them with blankets. Crochet and sing lullabies. That sort of thing.

Mine even does dishes.

Sometimes.

Anybody who's been reading the news knows by now that the Great Chapter Eleven is shortly to become the Great Chapter Seven. After a year and several months of employing yours truly, ExciteAtHome is going to close their doors and turn off their servers in approximately 90 days. In the meantime, they'll start layoffs, effective almost immediately. Any employee who isn't going to be part of the transitioning of subscribers from the @Home network to local cable provider networks will probably be considered unnecessary staff and become intimately acquainted with ye old pink slip.

That'll be me, folks. Give me a couple of days, and then you can welcome me to the ranks of the unemployed.

I wobbled my way in to work today, gathering no few stares of astonishment on my way. On Friday, I'd attempted to spend some time in the office, thinking that if this was to be the last day of our shared employment, I should spend the time at the office with my buddies. I lasted for all of two hours, after which I sent myself home due to their continuous disinclination to obey the simplest of quarantine rules.

"Badapa wad de kubukad," I croaked, flapping my hands at them between coughing and snorting.

Indian Mom and Indian Woman the Second puttered into my cube to feel my forehead, pat me on the head, and massage my shoulders.

"You don't sound good," Indian Mom fretted, and cooled my face with her hands.

"Bahada kubaka," I insisted, and hacked some more.

"Is she trying to say something?" Indian Woman the Second wondered to Indian Mom.

"YOU SICK," declared the Firecracker over the cubicle wall. "YOUR BOYFRIEND TELL ME OVER YAHOO MESSENGER TAKE CARE OF YOU."

Indian Mom shook her head reproachfully at me. "You should go home," she ordered.

"SDAY ABAY," I wheezed.

"What?" said Indian Woman the Second.

The Manager drifted over to dangle across the cube wall and regard me thoughtfully. "She wants you to stay away," she advised. "She doesn't want you to get sick."

"Oh," said Indian Mom.

"It's too late," said Indian Woman the Second.

The Firecracker disappeared.

"Yeb," I sighed, and went home.

Bankruptcy is a weird thing, one that I haven't really gone into here for reasons mostly to do with my tendency towards procrastination. It's actually not that complicated a subject; anybody who works in Silicon Valley these days is probably intimately acquainted with the way it goes.

ExciteAtHome, for those that don't know, is -- was -- a company run by a textbook conflict of interest. As a company, we sold our services to cable providers such as Cox, Comcast, Charter, and AT&T. We managed their broadband cable internet service for them. In return, they paid us a little over 30% of whatever they got from their subscribers. That's, you know, your next door neighbor, the one on the block who isn't an AOL and knows that the mouse isn't a foot pedal. The problem was, ExciteAtHome (which used to be just plain 'AtHome' until they made what turned out to be a disasterous merger with Excite.com for the purposes of content instead of linking up with AOL, who was also interested), only got 30% of whatever the cable company charged the subscriber.

For your average subscriber who was paying $40 a month, that'd be, what, $13? On the other hand, if AT&T decided to do a promotional deal by which anybody who signed up new to the service got two months free, followed by $20/month subscriptions for the rest of the year, guess how much ExciteAtHome got.

Yeah. 30% of nothing is awfully similar to nothing.

On top of this, AT&T owned something like 70% of the voting stock of the company. "How can a company that has to be your customer be in charge of your board?" you might ask. "Isn't that a conflict of interest?"

"For that matter, when the company goes into bankruptcy due to $1 billion in debt and hundreds of bad business decisions, and the company that controls the board tries to buy the bankrupt company for bargain basement prices, wouldn't it kind of look like the controlling company had an interest in having the bankrupt company go bankrupt?" you might also ask.

To which I would say, "Hey, look! Shiny things on my toilet!"

A company goes into bankruptcy with or without a sponsor. If a sponsor shows up, the sponsor is the one who gets final bid on the assets. In our case, this was AT&T. On the other hand, control of the company gets turned over to a committee comprised of the people that the bankrupt company owes money to. In our case, this means pretty much anybody in Silicon Valley who makes an actual, you know, product. The creditors committee was annoyed at AT&T, who offered $307 million for the entire company.

"Don't be stupid," said the creditors. "It's worth a lot more than that. This company could make money. It's worth at least $700 million."

"We're not spending any more than that," said AT&T, and did a little dance.

"You suck," said the creditors, and ran to the bankruptcy judge.

"We want to turn off access to the cable companies that won't negotiate with us," they announced.

"Okay," said the judge. "Go for it."

"Shit," said the other cable companies, who weren't, like, morons. They started making their own networks and transferring their subscribers out of @Home's network. It's possible this was sort of a breach of contract. Eh. Who's counting.

"We're going to turn off your subscribers," threatened the creditors, "and then we'll see who needs who."

"Just try it," jeered AT&T.

I gained a few moments of clarity on Saturday, long enough to attempt to download my email before AT&T decided to jump off of @Home, thereby losing all of my email.

No access.

"We're going to transfer you all to our new network," announced AT&T. "Don't worry. You'll get a couple of days of outage, but it'll be fine."

"It took us five years to create this network," I thought to myself. "There's no way they'll get it up and running in a couple of days."

On Monday morning I had access again.

"Hah," said AT&T.

"We're good," said AT&T.

"We're screwed," said Yuhri.

"How is it possible that a network that took five years to build can be replicated and transitioned in the space of a couple of days?" asked someone at work. "We developed a lot of this technology ourselves. It's supposed to be intellectual copyright. Can anybody say, suspicious?"

"Can anybody say libel?" asked someone else.

"Turns out we don't need you," said AT&T, and retracted their offer to buy the company.

"Well," said our CEO during the all-hands meeting today. "This is the end."

Yeah.

My yhirata1@home.com address, the one I thought would be mine to keep, is gone now. So are all the emails that have been sent to it since I got sick. There are people in the company that I work with, people who could get me my email. Maybe. Those who've attempted to send email to yhirata1@home.com since last Tuesday, the last time I was in the 99-degree body temperature demographic, should probably start poking through their 'sent' folders in their email applications and launch those suckers again, this time to the one email address I can be fairly confident will work: yhirata1@yahoo.com.

A bunch of us exchanged our personal email addresses at work, thinking that this way we would be able to stay in touch afterwards. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't. But I'll tell you what, out of that bunch of emails, only one of them wasn't with yahoo. And only one of them was with AOL.

And none of them were with @Home.

How's that for irony?