Seattle
I drive into Seattle with 600 bucks. I know nobody here.
I need a job fast and within a week I land one on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.
I like stupid jobs. At Microsoft I install office furniture. Desks, panels, shelves, we also move offices, sometimes by whole floors. I like simple jobs because they're mandalas in the basest sense, and as a writer they help me not to sell out. I have yet to hear of a mainstream writer that didn’t lick ykw's balls. Here’s 20 bucks if you show me one that hasn’t.
On starting at Microsoft, Chad, my driver, and I get to reinstall a cabinet in one of the geeks’ offices. Piece of cake, we do it in under 20 minutes, drop a kind word, bow, and leave. And this guy must’ve had a tough morning, or a breakdown, or, you know, and we soothed it for him, because within minutes he emails our office with oh so much thanks and how we did it professionally and with class. They slap the email out on the board and I said that Chad supplied professionalism and myself class. It stuck. I worked on the campus till I could rent a 1 bedroom by Green Lake, buy the furniture, a computer, and the rest. Then I moved on.
I know you'd love to hear what it was like inside Microsoft, and I'll tell you that what struck me the most was this juice they had for free. You could drink as much OJ as you could survive. The restocking crew were rolling the hand trucks in and out of the kitchens like happy penguins all day long. Must've been Bill's adolescent head trip of how he would make the corpo world better when he grows up.
Same with Jeff I guess, because when I later worked for Amazon, I'd bump into jillions of geeks walking in and out of the corpo huts their brown, yellow, spotted, obese, puny, proud, rude, lickspittle, asbo, adhd, spike-haired, etc., tail workers eager for a ten. The geeks would heartily pick up their crap with thin plastic bags, some making a twirl and taking it inside, probably for a doctor.
One weekend I was walking around Green Lake and this working single woman (there are no others in Seattle) was finishing picking up after her significant other. And I go, y’know, just the other day I read in the American Scientist that the researchers at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Developmental Ethology in Vienna, Austria, have bred the kind of a dog that doesn’t crap, no thick stuff whatsoever, everything zips via urine ducts. Oh, really! she said.