I found him again today, in 1997 talking about an original online community and that was in the early nineties. I was twenty-one and working at my first job in New York in a tall skyscraper. There was a lot of shift happening; the boss who helped pay for my move to New York ended up not even coming, but he kindly found me a job in another department. It was supposed to be some sort of technology department but the dinosaur who ran it wouldn’t know the internet if he’d lived to see it and I had little to do, so I spent most of my days on usenet.

eventually that company got bought by a bigger company and they dissolved our department but the ole dinosaur god bless him got me a job in yet another department; it wasn’t permanent, but it was a paycheck for a bit more of my future. this time i wound up in a server room with tomwhore.

there were others, too, i think, but the only ones i remember are the boss and tomwhore, and only tomwhore by name. the boss guy had terrible eighties hair and chain smoked and was always angry and since i was in the server room now i stopped covering my tiny little nose stud and tried to start normalizing it in the corporate world. people were just starting to get desktop computers in their cubicles. lynx was a mysterious new world.

jobs were kind of getting fluid at this company and tomwhore tried to advocate for me to get a permanent job but the boss, who was a Cypriot and was constantly on the phone with his brother (who was in Cyprus) did not want to hire me because of my nose piercing. So he just kept stealing computers from the company and sending them to Cyprus.