So, like Cyan, I found myself doing tech support for a mom & pop ISP. But we grew quickly -- within a few years, cais.net was a major regional backbone. Nearly half of the other ISP's in the D.C. area got their connectivity through us. I was making social contacts all over the world, many of whom I still correspond with nearly ten years later.

From my point of view, the bubble began to form when the telcos started noticing the Internet. For CAIS it was a crummy little long-distance carrier with strange and probably unwholesome ties to the Dominican Republic, owned primarily as a hobby by the 3rd generation in a line of fancy hotel owners. When they came in, it all went to shit. Almost all of us who'd been working there were friends -- three of us shared a townhouse -- but suddenly instead of working late because we enjoyed it, we were working late because somebody had made a fucking STUPID decision and we were forced to fix it before we lost our peering.

Fast forward a bit, to 1997. My friend Justin Newton and I get the opportunity to move out to California to start a national backbone focused on providing connectivity to ISP's. Justin jumped at it because he was dating Domini, and she was already here; I jumped at it because, somehow, I always knew I'd end up in California. We also thought it'd be a fun job.

Turns out it was a bad time to try to start a backbone, thanks once again to the telcos. But we had fun. We hired this hella smart kid named Tristan to work in the NOC. We went to ISP conferences. Justin met Wayne and Marcy, and started going to parties. Critical Path was our first real customer.

After chatting for years on BOFHnet IRC, I finally met Lamont and Rachel and a bunch of other good folks. The first party I went to out here was at Lamont's. The second, which Wayne asked Brendan to invite me to, was Mazoween '97. The third was a Koinonea party.

Okay, Spring of 1998. For the first time in my life I was going out and being social, like, every weekend. I'd been introduced to ecstacy, and lots and lots of people. It was crazy fun.

I remember this clearly: I was sitting on a sofa next to Doug Humphrey (founder of Digex and Skycache, now perhaps best known as the guy who bought a battleship), quite high, talking about jobs. Wayne came over and sat down with us, and mentioned that Critical Path was looking for somebody to deal with abuse and spam stuff.

Two or three weeks later, I found myself being interviewed by Neck and Alf. When I signed my offer letter, I handed it to Davel to give to Uncle Ralph. So many of the good things in my life -- and almost all of you becoming my friends -- happened because I took that job.

When things started going downhill there, I thought I could hold out because I'd already been through one fastpath to crappiness. I was able, for the most part, to stop caring as much about the company. But I wasn't able to stop caring about the people. When I inevitably was forced out (and I still don't think I quit, even though that's what they told everyone), I seriously thought I'd be okay...but for like three or four days I just didn't go home. I think I couldn't handle the idea of not seeing all of you every day anymore. It took a long while to figure that out.

Rusty asked what I'd want to keep from those days. I'd keep the cameraderie. I'd keep the sense that together, we can do anything.

And you know, that's not gone. We're all still friends, in many cases much more deeply than before -- in part because we're not talking about work all the time; we have to talk about real things instead. All sorts of fun and amazing projects still happen, even though we can't just throw money at 'em anymore. Life is good.

But I don't know what to say to friends who've been unemployed for months or years and can't even get interviewed. It feels wrong, somehow, to say that my life's going well when theirs isn't...and there's nothing I can do to help.

Thanks for reading this far.