A Silicon Valley Fairy Tale

The story you are about to read is true.  The names have been changed to protect the guilty.  It was written at the height of the Silicon Valley bubble in 1999.

The characters in this Greek Tragedy are:
Dawn - Tax Consultant
Marie - Tax Director
Paul - Manager of something or other
Bill - Account Temp type person

Dawn, Marie, and I have been working together very well, they're both knowledgeable and hard working.  Dawn has been trying to extract herself from the company, as she was brought in for a 3 month project and has been there over a year.  A decision to bring in Bill to take over her routine tasks is made and that's when our little story begins.

When I meet Bill, he seems very nice and tells me he was central to his last company's Tax automation project.  I'm relieved, at least he has some experience, this should be cake.

When I begin the training classes, I notice that Bill has the usual problems of a person with no experience with a new system.  That's O.K., he just needs some time to practice.  But as time goes by, I begin to get the uneasy feeling that he's just not getting it.  What I didn't realize until too late, is that he didn't get ANY of it.  None, nada, nichts, keine, neima, ikke.

I went to great pains to create step by step documentation for doing major things.  I'm not talking outlines, I'm talking baby steps, and he's still tripping over his own two feet.

After about 6 weeks I've only been dealing with Bill about an hour a week, but alarm bells are ringing like the Chicago Fire.  Dawn and I begin to discuss our mutual issue, as it turns out she's frustrated because Bill can't do the tasks correctly.  All he has to do is file the tax returns, fairly straightforward considering his claimed experience.   However the day they are due he hands them to her all screwed up and she has to scramble to fix things.  She's tried to express to Marie that Bill can't handle the job.

Marie is just not dealing with the issue.  "Things will work out", she says.  Well they do, for Marie.  A week later she's on her way to a company about to go IPO.

Now Dawn is really upset, and with good reason.  Her credibility may be damaged, if there are big losses, people won't hire her.

Then one day during training, now mind you I'm only training Dawn and Bill at my desk, Bill falls asleep and begins snoring.

Whoop! Whoop!  "Captain!  Romulan Warbird decloaking directly a head!"

“That's OK”, I think, “He's not getting any less than if he was awake”.

By this time I'm beginning to call him Mr. Double Click.  He can't seem to master the art of double clicking his mouse.  He's clicking like mad, but the timing is all off and bizarre things are happening on the screen.  I'm seeing screens I've never seen before.  I'm incredulous.

One day the DBA, Vinod, stops me in the hall to tell me he spent a couple of hours assisting Bill.

"Mark", he says shaking his head, "He should not be allowed near a computer".  Yeah, tell me about it.

Whoop!  Whoop!  "Captain!  Romulan Warbird has fired a photon torpedo!"

But the Captain isn't listening.  Nobody really wants to be bothered, the company itself is going through an acquisition and spinoff to take advantage of the insanity of the stock market bubble.  Management is as limp as a noodle.  Everybody's too busy making money to think about the laws and the future.  What counts is the company's stock price today.  The excuses start, "Well maybe Bill needs more training.  We need to sit down with him and define expectations. Blah, blah, blah".

But now it becomes obvious Bill is not doing anything.  I know the month is over, but not a single question about the reports needed for his returns is forthcoming.  As this is his only job, what the hell is he doing with his time?

One day I come over and help Bill get some reports. He's clicking all over the screen.

"Where are your instructions?"

Bill roots through some folders and comes up with my step by step instructions.  He then proceeds to ignore them and is clicking wildly again.

"Captain!  We're hit!  Shields at 50%!"

"What do the instructions say", I ask.

He looks at the instructions, unseeing, mutters something, and begins clicking wildly again.

"What do the instructions say", I repeat, a bit louder.

"Captain!  Shields have collapsed!  We're at their mercy!"

"Oh, Reports-Run", he replies.  More wild clicking follows.

"WHAT DO THE INSTRUCTIONS SAY!"

"Captain!  We're hit!  We've lost Deck 6!  Shouldn't we respond?"

I'm now growling in rage.  Is it possible to be this stupid?  I begin to envision the 11 o'clock news...

"Reports say the victim was hit repeatedly from behind with a blunt instrument"

This is the last straw, Dawn mounts a full court press to put Bill out of our misery but is rebuffed by Paul.  I really don't get this, he's a contractor, that's why you hire contractors, so you can get rid of them easily.

Now granted there's not a lot of people out there to replace Bill.  I swear as I pass by the county prison on the way to lunch that some days I see corporate recruiters waiting outside the gate to get the latest available labor supply as they are released at noon.

"Do you speak English?  No?  How about computer skills?  None?  Okay, here's your offer, and you get 5000 options to start."

Finally I show up to speak to Paul to put in the word that I'm not going to spend my time babysitting his temp.  I also discover that the reports need to be re-run, so I pop into Bill's cube.

"Bill, we need to re-run those reports". I stop in my tracks.  There on his screen, open in a web browser, is a woman, naked, on her knees, leaning back on one hand in a most unattractive pose, grimacing at me.

Now I'm no prude, I think the massive prevalence of web porn is directly attributable to our Puritan founders and we just haven't been able to relax a bit about sex in 400 years, but you have to be a moron to surf porn at work.  And to top it off I found myself in violent disagreement with Bill’s taste in women.  Really guy?  All the free stuff out there and this is what you like?  You sick bastard.

Bill is surprised and embarrassed.  He tries to close the screen.  Furious clicking ensues.

I stand there speechless.

He can't do it.  The naked woman starts moving around his screen.  More clicks and more web browsers start and more porn pops up, it’s multiplying exponentially like an out of control wild fire. He's trying to close them as fast as they're opening, and having no luck.

I look away.  I just can't watch.  I'm not sure what is more disgusting, the porn, or the computer ineptness.  Seconds tick by as slow as molasses being sucked through a straw by an emphysema victim on one lung.

Waiting.

Waiting..

Waiting....

The clicking stops.  He must be done, we can now do the reports.  I turn back.  The bitch is still there in all her glory.  Mocking me.  Ug.

Bill finally decides to use the menus to close things up.  That's when I notice his toolbar.

Totally empty.

It's not like he was doing work and got distracted, he wasn't doing anything except cruising porn!

"Oh My God!", I realize,"He can't do anything right.  I'm working with George Costanza from Seinfeld!  That’s what this is, I'm in a sitcom.  This is a joke.  If given some more time he'll have a little bed built under his desk so he can take a nap unobserved."  I begin looking under the desk for an alarm clock on a shelf.

Not yet.  I turn around, looking for the video camera.  None to be found, this is real life.

We both act like nothing happened and he re-runs the report with me standing behind him like Dilbert with his boss, directing his actions.

"Now move the mouse left.  Up a little more.  A little moooorrrree...now click.  No, not there!  O.K. close that.  Move to that little 'X'..."

This goes no further.  I finally have a weapon which is unassailable.  I march into Paul's office and explain that normally I wouldn't complain about the web porn thing, after all people surf their stocks and kids stuff all the time, but the fact that the reports are all tucked away where they can't possibly be worked on ticks me off to no end.

Paul cracks up when I tell him the story.  It turns out that he's already talked to Bill about it once.  He was caught printing the pictures!  Paul finally agrees George Costanza, umm, Bill, must go.

What?  He's been caught once, talked to, and is still doing it?  How much more stupid can he be?  How much more stupid can you be Paul?  This is amazing!  This is identical to the episode where George kept trying to get fired by the Yankees and couldn't.  I am truly living a sitcom.  Sitcom Valley, that's what this is.

But in the end it turns out that this will be all for Bill.  He's gone over the edge.  Not because he's stupid, incompetent, and unable to perform the job, but because he's politically incorrect.

Well whatever, as long as he's gone.

Working in the fields

“Where’s everybody go?” I asked.

Someone pointed at the white van parked outside the giant shed, “Immigration”.

I was working out in the fields of Hollister as a very young man. My girlfriend Elvia was this chubby little Mexican girl I’d met at college, being Mexican in Hollister meant you had one skill set, manual labor. It didn’t matter how intelligent or educated she was. But to be fair, those were the jobs in in that area, it was also what she was used to doing, it was comfortable, and she and her family had been doing it their whole lives. She’d gotten me a job at Felice Farms cutting ‘cots with her. ‘Cots was short for apricots, it was an apricot farm.

Cutting ‘cots was hot hard work. There was a giant slab of concrete with all the machinery on it covered by a large tin roof. This kept the sun off you and was much preferable to being outside the shed. Teenagers and the young women would pop apricots into a slicer, it would slice the ‘cots in half, sending them down a chute where they would get dumped on large wooden slats. Older women would then turn the ‘cots face up and remove bad ‘cots. Then at the end of the line men would stack the wooden flats and take them to a shed to be bathed in a sulfur steam bath before being hauled out and spread in the sun. There the sun would dry them in about four hours. They would then be scraped off the wood slats into large boxes before being packaged for sale. The apricot pits were shipped to Mexico to be made into Laitrile, a dubious but understandably popular last ditch cancer hope.

That’s what I did the first day, spread ‘cots in the hundred degree Hollister heat. At lunchtime all of the Americans and green card holders working beside me quit. There was no way it was worth the money, only the illegals were left. The only reason I didn’t quit was I wasn’t going to be beaten.

The second day I was blessedly promoted to handing boxes to the cutters inside the shed and out of the sun. Each box held about 35 pounds of ‘cots and the cutters were paid 35 cents per box. I would remove the old box, give them a new box, and stamp their punch cards. At the end of the day the punches were added up and they were paid in cash. They could empty those big boxes in no time, so I had to move fast. I moved tons and tons of apricots that summer.

I didn’t get promoted because I was a gringo, I got promoted because I could count. The previous day the other guy had punched more cards than there were boxes processed. This was a game the girls would play, they always complained you forgot to punch their card. You had to figure out who was lying and who wasn’t.

I was one of only three gringo laborers, another guy my age on the other line, and a fourteen year old girl named Alice who’d just moved from Iowa and was making some extra summer pocket change. Everyone else was Hispanic, and 80% of those illegal. Who else would want to do that work? I talked with Alice a lot because I didn’t really know much Spanish, and teased her about being from Iowa.

“So Alice, what do you do for excitement in Iowa when you’re not watching corn grow?”

“Mark, you can hear it growing at night!”

“No kidding.”

Or

“Alice! What’s the state motto for Iowa?”

“I don’t know, what’s the state motto for Iowa?”

“Iowa, Gateway to Nebraska”.

One time the machinery had broken down and we were resting against a wall while they fixed it. One of the ladies came back in and started babbling at us in Spanish. I got up.

“What’d she say?” Elvia asked me.

“Get back to work” I answered.

Elvia looked at me quizzically, “How’d you know?”

“I dunno, seemed obvious”.

It was a good life lesson. I always tell people that ever since then with every job I’ve gotten paid more and worked less. But I always knew that no matter how hard the work was, (12 hour days in the heat and dust left my hands with callouses like bear paws), I was going back to college and a better life. I would come home every night and soak in the tub for thirty minutes or more. Even my young body had a hard time handling the backbreaking work.

The people I was working with, men in their thirties and forties, who looked older, had no such future. Tomorrow would be the same as today with no letup. They would pack up their entire family of six to eight kids and head off down to the next farm, following the crops. Their kids never got much schooling except wherever they set down for the winter; I wondered how they would turn out.

It was a hard life, but could be a happy one too. They didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, so they celebrated after work each day with some ad-hoc fiesta at a local park or sometimes right on the farm. They’d just pull up two buckets, lay a board on top as a bench, turn the car stereos up, pop a beer, and party. While I, a white middle class kid, saved and starved and hunkered down for the future. Then you realize the future is always insecure and they were right, live life for today; but my tight-ass middle class upbringing still won’t allow me to live that way.

I remember meeting my buddy Jose’s grandfather who had been a migrant farm worker his whole life, he was 100 years old and he’d had five wives and 162 grandchildren, and counting. He’d lived a good full life that should not to be besmirched by lily white liberals who anxiously wring their hands at his ‘impoverished’ existence. For some people money isn’t everything, or anything.

I learned how the other half lived. The women would all gossip and carry on while doing what I considered a mind numbing job, but to them it was fairly easy work. They didn’t have to think much and guess what, except for some cut fingers, they didn’t bring their work home to worry about every night. They didn’t get fifty e-mails on the commute home and have to attend conference calls at all hours of the day and night.

Our foreman was a guy named Mitch who’s claim to fame was his ability to fart the national anthem. Needless to say, I was not working with rocket scientists.

I looked at the guys from Immigration, they’d caught maybe a handful of people out of a hundred-and-fifty and were taking them away in the van. Like drops in the ocean. These guys would be shipped back to Mexico and the next day would come right back.

I wondered where everyone was hiding, it was an apricot farm and apricot trees are not that big, certainly not big enough to hide behind or up in the branches. And it seem silent, everyone just quietly slipped away. I found out later that the farm owners had hidden some of them under the crawl space of their house. Good guys for helping out those in need or ruthless exploiters looking out for themselves? With illegal immigration there is no black and white.

I’ve always said that no wall will keep out illegal immigrants. Plus there are ships outside the Golden Gate that drop off hundreds of Chinese illegals a week. Multiply that by all the other port cities and people from other countries and you see how big the problem really is. We would need a mile high Berlin Wall around the entire country, and a dome to boot.

There’s only one solution, if you put 100 business owners who employ illegals in jail, illegal immigration will stop tomorrow. As long as there are jobs waiting these poor people would be crazy not to come.

Politicians love to demonize each other about the subject, but there’s actually a conspiracy to continue this horrible game with people’s lives. Democrats love illegals (sorry, they call them ‘undocumented workers’ as a way to make it sound like it’s just a minor paperwork snafu) because they constitute an underclass that will vote for them someday when they will obviously be granted citizenship (you gotta let them stay, it’s only fair, they played the game by the unwritten rules we wrote), and Republicans love them because they provide cheap slave-like submissive labor for businesses and drive down American wages. An article in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago noted that illegals work in the chicken factories for $7 an hour while an American want’s $9 an hour for the same job. Over 20% higher wage costs for an American who knows his rights? You gotta be nuts to hire the American.

La Inmigración didn’t catch any of my new friends, and later one, a youngster named Dorotero, emerged from a cubby hole in the machinery smiling happily, he’d lived another day in America.

But Alice looked desperate, she watched the van as they loaded up, then she looked at me, fear covered her face.

“Oh Mark! Please don’t let them send me back to Iowa!”