I went the way of bandwidth manipulation as my profession because of three main reasons. One, I failed Spanish in high school so why would I attempt to learn programming. Another language is but another language. I figured the rest of the planet will all speak English soon enough and it wouldn’t be long before a gizmo of some sort will be implanted in our brains that allows us to translate hip-hop into code. It all seemed to be a waste of time to learn with the inevitable in site. Two, I had had enough of trying to wade through everyone’s desk crap, moving things that should have never been there in the first place, as if it mattered that I returned everything to where I had found it—just to get to the monitor or open the case of the CPU. Three, at the time in the late 80’s, the pay was similar to nonunion trench digging. Communications was it, the wave of the future. Everyone needed it. Expansion and development were mutually inclusive entities. Money was readily available. Layoffs were nonexistent. The sky was the limit, baby.

Bandwidth is delivery. It is Dominos Pizza without the paper hat and rusted Pinto. It’s fast, it’s streaming hot, and it’s cheap. It also comes with conditions and expectations. It is born of military roots and governed by the oppression of the bottom line. It is subject to whims and hype, of feeding frenzy and denial. Of course, I didn’t see all of that stuff coming. I saw 25K a year plus overtime. It was 1989.

Well, to make a long introduction short, I now am on my third telecommunications company in three years yet I drive the same van complete with the wrong phone number decaled on the side and tools I never use. The first one divested its communication division because of a stockholder revolt (and some Enron-esque type dealings), the second bought the customer base of the first so as to beef up its total worth before filling chapter 11 and posting a large for sale sign on the front door, and then my there is current employer, which is well known for making refrigerators and blenders. They got a 100 million dollar a year company for 15 million and retired a 200 million dollar debt. Not bad, eh?