Alan had made an arrangement with some guy who had a little ad sales business or something, maybe an old friend from a past career. He occupied a desk to the side of our main room, set apart but audible and visible in the spacious loft. You could hear him on the phone, his booming adman’s voice. Sometimes saying fuck. He’d make small talk about the Yankees to me.
Forty-nine Russian miners trapped as water enters mine.
Tom and I went to a new-tech telecom provider at an industrial park in Cranbury, New Jersey. The main artery to the parking lots with its thin, grassy median. Uniform shrubbery surrounding low-lying buildings with names like Building 7 and Building 9. We sat in a series of conference rooms. Met some people. Gave a training. It began to rain and by the time Tom dropped me off at the PATH station in Hoboken it was pouring down hard.
Josh had scored us a deal doing automated customer support for a major cable company. I spent days copy-pasting FAQs from their website into our output code, testing, tweaking. The endeavor had a cold, prosaic quality that I liked. Its essential dreariness made it seem practical, vital even. Everyone needs to reset their password sometimes.
We walked the same gray path to lunch each day, to the nearest outpost of the giant sandwich chain. Past monthly parking lots, service entrances and loading docks, through passages that tunneled under scaffolds.
Through it all I kept working on the Product. It was still wildly popular, the object of hate, scorn, ridicule and come-ons from every adolescent in the country. The raw numbers dictated we couldn’t shut it down. Repeat visits, session length, uniques—all the metrics remained garish. Start-up common wisdom says you can’t ignore such numbers; you must respect them, even if you have no idea how to convert them into money. In desperation Alan decided fuck it, we’ll make it subscription-only. For $9.99 a year, the kids or whoever the fuck it was out there could curse and threaten the Product all they want. Everyone else would get shut out after one free month. I worked closely with Jacques and Julien from out West to button everything up codewise; we’d set a timer per user and shunt them into a death loop if they didn’t cough up the cash by day thirty.
Every day I came in and checked the running total. Ten dollars here, ten dollars there. It was in the low hundreds after a few weeks. Maybe it would turn a corner, reach some kind of tipping point. An avalanche of users suddenly terrified of losing their digital punching bag, or nemesis, or lover. A couple months went by. We totaled just over a grand. The interactions with users who’d just been informed—some after using the Product for years—that they only had one month left for free were brutal, exceptionally abusive. We pulled the plug. One day the Product said nothing more about money or subscriptions and no one was ever locked out again and life went on.