Shredding Memories

One of the good things about moving is that it’s a time to go through all the useless dross you’ve collected over the years and throw that trash out. It doesn’t matter what it is, if I haven’t seen it in two years, it’s gone. As a corollary, in many respects I’m not given to nostalgia, and when it comes to junking crap I’m usually fairly ruthless, but last night proved to be an interesting walk down memory lane.

While going through one of the filing cabinets we acquired (which we stopped using after it got so full that we had to move on to the next one that got so full… rinse lather repeat…) I ran across much of the documentation from the first real job I had after moving to Vancouver and graduating university with my 2nd degree. Let me take you back to that mystical time:

It was the year 2000; mankind was in awe of its ability to weather the crisis that was known as Y2K but also slightly ashamed of the panic we ourselves had created over that same crisis. I stepped off the plane in April to meet my future wife and begin that university graduate’s nightmare: the job search. University is a wonderful place, but with the exception of a couple of programs (business, engineering) it doesn’t really do a whole lot to prepare you for a world in which you pay your own bills, make your own food, live your own life; to do all of which you need a job.

I was in a magical place (not Vancouver). It was a place where I had been transformed like an ugly duckling, wandering into the business department from my Arts background and coming out with my Masters in Business. It was the land of opportunity. My English degree was for fun, I joked, and the MBA was for practicality. In retrospect there were a couple of dark sides that at the time I was unaware of (which makes it like a triangle or something): virtually every graduate of every university seemed to have been given a free MBA on their way out the door (talk about dilution of currency) and that other looming giant on the horizon: the Student Loan.

But despite the darkness of the landscape, we were in a golden time. It was the era of the DOT COM; a magical era when the same conman that was selling you Uncle Bob’s Hair Removal and Growth Tonic the week before could sell you stock in his upcoming IPO on IEatShorts.com. Any fool with a computer could and did make a website, and any fool on Wall Street could and did tell you it was worth something. And with that stage set, I landed at Stockscape.

Stockscape, on the surface, was a financial news web site. We offered our own take on the news stories, real time stock quotes so you could see how your stock of newfiehitmen.com was doing, and newsletters which gave fairly questionable investing advice. Oh, and we did “email blasts” (think spam).

Situated at the corner of Howe and Cordova, the Stockscape building was likely to be the first casualty of an earthquake. But we were tech. We were downtown. Maybe it was that high priced rent that killed us.

The company, I later discovered, was a converted mining operation (frankly it went from mineral mining to data mining) and some of the executive, unfortunately, came over from that very business. Our COO, in fact, was a 73 year old chemical engineer who believed that a website’s table of contents belonged on the right side of the page because most people were right handed. Maybe it was the lack of youth in the executive that killed us.

I was hired as a writer to cover the Canadian markets by James, one of the more intelligent people I’ve ever met, and he was a man with a vision. His integrity forced him to lay the Monty Python “Spam!” skit whenever he sent out one of our vaunted “email blasts.” He struggled for months to bring about his vision of what our content department should be; he butted heads with the programmers, with the executives, and the sales teams but in the end he left the company in frustration. Perhaps it was his leaving that killed us.

The atmosphere of the company was great. A fair number of cynical people in one spot (which is the actual definition of dot com), with as much fodder as could be imagined in the form of management. Young people with heightened metabolisms working next to a McDonalds. The guy in the corner who said “IT Sucks!” all the time whether it did or not. The Croatian Programmer. The Asian IT guy who spoke no words of English with the unfortunate name of Hong (after his hiring all subsequent IT problems were referred to as “Hong Ups”). The teenagers working at the company whom we strongly suspected of being underage (but didn’t care because they knew what they were doing). All of this contributed to an atmosphere that was really and truly awesome.

The content department was also fairly typical in its array of characters. After James’ departure the content department was taken over by yours truly. With growing confidence as a writer and a freehand to scribe whatever I wanted, I was merely lucky the low readership kept us from being sued. The IPO writer who we were sure jabbed the full time market writer in the eye to take over his spot, and proceeded to write better than the temperamental Frenchman ever could. The Temperamental Frenchman who’s greatest claim to fame was having once been in a bar brawl with Russell Crowe. The talented freelancer whom we had to let go; the talented freelancer whom we convinced to work full time and then had to let go. All of these people came together to form a unit on the verge of success before the plug was pulled by that mysterious clock and dagger group called the Shareholder. As the Content Manager I had to let each and everyone of those people go as our financial situation worsened and that well and truly sucked.

Generally we could tell how the company was doing by the pomp and circumstance of the company meals. Christmas that first year was celebrated at Hy’s Steakhouse – delicious, delectable and an open bar. Summer of the following year was Joe Fortes, another of Vancouver’s trendy eateries. After that the situation got grimmer. When company lunch turned out to be order in pizza we all got the sense that there was a hole in the ship somewhere and then it got to the point where the company lunch turned out to be coffee break.

At the end the company was bought out with the hopes of flipping it. I was kept around to write articles and a 17 year old was kept around to make sure those articles stayed on this bucking bronco that was the Internet. Readership went up, but the final straw in my career with Stockscape was when I politely refused to endorse companies who’s primary function was to loot the stock portfolio of 86 year olds.

One week my contract was not renewed.

From there I went on to two years of multiple part time jobs until finally landing in the job I currently despise. Now there are a bunch of pay stubs, some letters of intent, some useless stock options in a box that’s about to go to the shredder. Theses are my physical reminders of those times. I have other reminders though. The IPO writer and I turned into fairly good friends, verging on arch-nemesis, and through him I met Fist, I met John and Roc and a goodly number of others who are damn fine people.

And that is the true legacy of Stockscape.