Give people choice and freedom and they’ll pay. Try to sue your own frickin’ customers into oblivion and we’ll see you in bankruptcy.

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/washpost/20030909/ tc_washpost/a47297_2003sep9&e=1 RIAA vs. the People Tue Sep 9,11:06 AM ET

By Cynthia L. Webb, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer

The Recording Industry Association of America ( news -web sites )made good on its promise to prosecute Americans who engage in the illegal downloading and trading of pirated music, filing 261 copyright violation suits yesterday.

“Legal actions have been taken on a sporadic basis against operators of pirate servers or sites, but ordinary computer users have never before been at serious risk of liability for widespread behavior. The RIAA said that’s the point it’s underlining with the unprecedented legal action,” CNET’s News.com reported.

But in an editorial today, the San Jose Mercury News said the RIAA’s legal campaign is bad policy: “Suing your customers, as a long-term strategy, is dumb — even if they bring misfortune upon themselves. … The suits are the unfortunate, but predictable response of an industry that failed to see the Internet until it stared it in the face. Since Napster ( news -web sites ) first appeared four years ago and declared the death of the compact disc, music CD sales have fallen more than 25 percent. A generation of music fans don’t think twice about copyrights, which they associate with overpriced CDs and parasitic studio execs.”

According to the Mercury News editorial board, the music labels “won’t win back many of those customers until they make their full catalog of tunes easily accessible over the Internet, in formats that people want, at prices they’re willing to pay. That’s starting to happen — Apple Computer ‘s iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com are offering songs from 49 cents to $1 — but the offerings are limited. The music studios are still dragging their feet. For now, the big labels hope to scare people straight, particularly parents, since copyright owners can sue children for theft.”

The New York Times pointed out an even larger implication of the RIAA suits: “With the club of lawsuits and the olive branch of an amnesty program, the music industry is waging a campaign against online piracy that relies on both public relations and economics to attack the idea that everything in cyberspace can be free,” the article said. “That will not be easy. The Internet sprang from a research culture where information of all kinds was freely shared. That mentality still resonates with the millions of Internet users who routinely download music onto their computers. But the emphatic message of the music industry’s two-step program announced yesterday is that the days of plucking copyrighted songs off the Internet without paying for them are numbered.”

An Escalating Fight Against Ordinary People

Thousands more lawsuits against fileswappers are expected in the coming months as the RIAA looks to make examples of the worst digital pirates: People accused of downloading and sharing on average more than 1,000 illegally downloaded songs, thanks to Gnutella ( news -web sites ),Kazaa ,Grokster and other popular file-trading services.

The Washington Post said the “legal offensive aims to stem the tide of online song sharing launched by Napster in the late 1990s, and it is likely to strike fear into the hearts of parents who have not closely monitored their teenagers’ computer habits. That’s because the lawsuits were filed against the holders of Internet service accounts, regardless of who in the household was responsible for swapping the songs.”

The Los Angeles Times said the “cases — the first of thousands the labels expect to file in federal courts — mark a turning point in the music industry’s four-year battle against rampant piracy on the Internet. For the first time, the recording industry is training its considerable legal firepower on individuals, not the companies profiting from the public’s hunger for free music,” The Los Angeles Times said. “One quirk in the process, though, is that the defendants named aren’t necessarily the people using file-sharing networks. That’s because the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s investigation identified only the people whose Internet access accounts were being used to share files. They might be the parents, roommates or spouses of the alleged pirates.”

The RIAA suits hit the young and old and stretched across economic lines too. Among those sued is the Bassett family from Northern California. ” Scott Bassett said neither he nor his wife used the family PC in Redwood City, Calif., for music, but their teenagers and dozens of their friends do. Had he known what was going on, he said, ‘I would have pulled the plug,'” The Los Angeles Times reported, quoting the former junkyard operator who, like other targets of the suits, was confused about what to do. “Do I really need to hire a lawyer? Can I just call them up and say I’m sorry and give them back all the music that was downloaded? I’m just a little guy,” Bassett told the paper.

The Bassetts were darlings of the media yesterday, appearing in a number of articles, perhaps since they illustrated so nicely the ironic twist of the suits, which can target people who own the ISP accounts, not necessarily the file-swappers themselves. “I can’t believe this,” Vonnie Bassett , mother of a 17-year-old file-swapper, told The San Jose Mercury News. “To think I might actually have to pay money to these people. I think it’s the stupidest thing that the recording industry would do this.”

Lisa Schamis , a 26-year-old New Yorker, “said her Internet provider warned her two months ago that record industry lawyers had asked for her name and address, but she said she had no idea she might be sued. She acknowledged downloading ‘lots’ of music over file-sharing networks,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “This is ridiculous,” Schamis said. “People like me who did this, I didn’t understand it was illegal.” Neither did Nancy Davis , a Sanol, Calif. schoolbus driver. “From what I understood — and I’m not the most computer-savvy person in the world — I thought it was becoming legal,” Davis told The San Francisco Chronicle. “I’m completely shocked by the whole thing,” Heather McGough , a single mom of two children from Santa Clarita, Calif., told The Los Angeles Times. She “figured that the music-sharing services that survived after Napster was shut down must be legal. She said she let a friend install a program for the Kazaa file-sharing network on her computer so that she could listen to music — songs she already owned on CDs — while she worked.”

Paying the Piper

So what’s in store for those snared in the RIAA lawsuits? “The RIAA suits seek an injunction to stop the defendants’ file sharing, as well as damages and court costs. Copyright law allows for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement — in other words, per swapped song,” The Washington Post noted. More from The Boston Globe: “Accusing the defendants of copyright infringement, the music association is requesting statutory damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song, bringing the potential liability of some file-sharers into the millions of dollars.”

“Individuals, I’m sure no matter who they are, simply don’t have that kind of money,” Atlanta attorney Doug Isenberg , who specializes in Internet law, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And there’s no way possible the RIAA can sue even a meaningful number of people, because there are tens of millions of potential defendants.”

Perhaps some good news for those being sued: The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the “RIAA has been settling for less: Yesterday, it announced $3,000 agreements with fewer than 10 people whose Internet service providers had received subpoenas.”

RIAA President Cary Sherman told The Los Angeles Times “he would welcome cases going to trial because it would help establish for the public that file sharing is illegal. The proceeds from any trials or settlements will be kept by the RIAA to cover the cost of its anti-piracy campaigns, he said, rather than being used to compensate labels and artists. Several lawyers warned that the RIAA’s amnesty offer may be a bad deal. Those who apply for amnesty from the RIAA must confess their past transgressions, but that won’t protect them from being pursued by music publishers, independent labels or even federal prosecutors.” The RIAA is offering amnesty to those who admitted to file-swapping, erase their digital libraries of songs and sign a notarized promise not to do it again.

Criticism From the Usual Suspects

Critics of the RIAA’s move were vocal in their objections to yesterday’s developments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation clearly hates the idea of the lawsuits. “Does anyone think that suing 60 million American file-sharers is going to motivate them to buy more CDs?,” EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer asked in a statement . “File sharing networks represent the greatest library of music in history, and music fans would be happy to pay for access to it, if only the recording industry would let them.”

Bill Evans , founder of Boycott-RIAA.com , told The Baltimore Sun that the lawsuits amount to a witch hunt. “They are trying to intimidate people and to stop file-sharing because they can’t control it,” Evans said. “If that’s the case, we believe they should take over a portion of the market and make it more affordable to people.”

Elan Oren , chief executive of file-sharing site iMesh , told The New York Times that “rather than filing huge lawsuits, record labels should work with file-sharing services to devise a method of compensation in exchange for legally distributing their music over the peer-to-peer networks. But record companies say creating a compensation system for file sharing — for instance, imposing a tax that could be redistributed to copyright holders — would be extremely difficult.”

“Michael McGuire , research director at the GartnerG2 research firm, said the threat of legal action needs to be just one part of a more widespread effort by the recording industry to deal with illegal Internet music swapping,” The Chicago Tribune said. “Are hard-core traders going to see the light and see the error of their ways?” McGuire told the paper. “I don’t think so.”

RIAA Strategy Paying Off

The music industry’s tactics, while controversial, have made a dent to some file-swapping. “Still, there is little agreement about whether the industry’s tactics are having much impact on music piracy. The recording industry has cited data from research firm NPD Group that estimated the number of households downloading music from the Internet declined 28% to 10.4 million in June from 14.5 million in April, around the time music companies began publicizing a campaign to target individual file sharers. Music companies have also been trying to wean music fans off file-sharing programs by licensing their songs to commercial music sites like Apple Computer Inc.’s Music Store,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “But services like Morpheus, LimeWire and Grokster all report that usage of their services has grown, especially as students have returned from vacation.”

But the music industry has a long way to go before it stamps out piracy. “From the rise of Napster until today, tens of millions of people have started trading songs, movies and software online through services such as Kazaa with little thought for the legality of their actions,” News.com noted. “Even as the threat of Monday’s lawsuits loomed, more than 2.8 million copies of the Kazaa software were downloaded last week, according to Download.com , a software aggregation site operated by CNET News.com publisher CNET Networks . Indeed, a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 67 percent of people downloading music said they did not care whether the music was copyrighted or not.”

The Future of E-Music?

Apple’s iTunes is being held up as a successful, legal alternative to secret file-swapping. The pay-for-play service has been a hit with music fans and everyone from Sony to Microsoft is looking for a comparable match to compete with the service. Apple’s service has sold 10 million songs since its launch in May. “Legally selling 10 million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere,” Apple head Steve Jobs ( news -web sites )said, according to BBC News Online, which noted (how ironic, in light of the complications of the RIAA’s legal suits) that the 10 millionth song sold on the service was “Complicated,” by Avril Lavigne .

> From: Bill Scannell
> Date: Wed Apr 9, 2003 8:56:10 AM US/Pacific
> To:
> Subject: Delta Air Lines Wins ‘Big Brother’ Award
>
> At a star-studded New York ceremony, CAPPS II collaborator Delta Air
> Lines
> has finally been recognized for their efforts to destroy privacy in
> America.
> Their prize? The ‘Big Brother’ award for Greatest Corporate Invader.
> An
> ‘Orwell’ – a statue of a large golden boot crushing a human head – is
> now on
> its way to Leo ‘The Collaborator’ Mullin’s office in Atlanta.
>
> http://www.boycottdelta.org/orwellaward.html
>
> http://www.privacyinternational.org/bigbrother/us2003/

Sorry, Superman

December 8, 2002 By STEVE KURUTZ

ON Broadway, in the upper 40’s, there used to be a series of buildings whose lobby phone booths served as makeshift offices for fly-by-night businessmen. The writer A. J. Liebling called these gentlemen Telephone Booth Indians because, as he put it, “in their lives the telephone booth furnishes sustenance as well as shelter, as the buffalo did for the Arapahoe and Sioux.”

If the Telephone Booth Indians could revisit their old stamping grounds today, they would likely go pale at the lack of available real estate. Where once wooden phone booths filled the city’s hotels, office buildings and train stations, sometimes numbering 10 and 15 deep, the quaint structures are now near extinction. And the few that remain do so precariously.

Take the 16 antique booths in the main lobby of the Western Union Building at 60 Hudson Street. In the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, this regal Art Deco skyscraper, a nerve center for several telecom companies, has become a possible target for terrorists. Paradoxically, the very quality that makes the booths so endearing – the privacy they offered – has turned them into a haven for would-be bombers.

“I had to send a guard in there every time someone made a call,” said Bill Knight, the building’s security director. “It was too hectic.”

So starting in September 2001, Mr. Knight deemed the booths off limits to the public and said they would probably remain so indefinitely. Asked if the decision drew complaints, Mr. Knight’s reply spoke volumes. “Not really,” he said, shrugging. “Everybody has cellphones now.”

For the remaining New Yorkers who still cherish the solitary experience of placing a phone call from a booth, the situation at 60 Hudson Street represents the latest in a long, losing battle against modern technology, when even a lobbyist as strong as Superman seems powerless.

Granted, cellphones fit inside coat pockets a lot easier than do phone booths. But they offer little of the discretion that booths were famous for. Instead, cellphones have turned the city’s public spaces into a pulpit of the personal. People argue with their lovers out on the sidewalk. Friends dial one another and discuss movies they are seeing, while actually at the movies they are seeing.

The current state of affairs is all the more surprising given that New York was perhaps once the capital of phone booths. At their peak of popularity, they were scattered across America, from the Atlanta train station to the Mojave Desert. But it was in New York, a bustling city of pedestrians and passers-by, that the phone booth achieved its greatest cultural impact.

At one point in the 1960’s, the busiest booth in the world was No. 17 at the southern end of Grand Central Terminal, which registered 300 calls a day. The spare, cinematic quality of phone booths – three walls, one door, a secret world within a world – also attracted directors like Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Fosse, who set a scene from “Sweet Charity” in one of them.

Much of the appeal lay in their homey comforts. There was a seat to perch on and a small shelf on which to write. An electric fan provided fresh air while an overhead lamp kept your thoughts illuminated.

The booths, many of them made at a Western Electric factory in Middle Village, Queens, were usually made of sturdy oak or mahogany. This meant that conversations remained safely inside while noise from the outside world was kept blissfully at bay.

Only New Yorkers could truly appreciate such a tiny, peaceful space.

Vanessa Gruen, 63, an official at the Municipal Art Society, remembers ducking into the booths whenever she was out job- or apartment-hunting. “If you needed to confirm an appointment, you could close the door and get away from the street noise,” she said. “They were a real convenience.”

In an often cold and impersonal city, the booths could be wonderfully accommodating. Like magic chambers, they transformed themselves according to each person’s needs. The booths at Pennsylvania Station, for example, offered Holden Caulfield a place to agonize, as well as a temporary retreat from phonies. Uptown, the conniving publicist of “Sweet Smell of Success,” Sydney Falco, used the booths at the “21” Club to lay down a fast scam on the vicious columnist J. J. Hunsecker.

For many real New Yorkers, the story line was much the same, though less dramatic. Reporters like Joseph Mitchell found the small, soundproof rooms a good place to call in stories. Businessmen out of the office retreated into the wooden recesses and loosened their ties before dialing clients. In 1945, AT&T set up a row of phone booths on the Hudson River Pier for sailors returning home from the war. In working-class neighborhoods, booths at local drugstores, coffee shops and delis often served as the neighborhood telephone.

EVEN criminals found an upside. “If your house is tapped, who is going to know that you went up to the corner of Lexington and 68th Street to make a phone call?” asked an F.B.I. agent, Joseph Valiquette.

Architecturally, the booths were like the city itself: varied. Chinatown’s booths had pagoda roofs. At fancy spots like the Waldorf-Astoria they were lavish, with arched doorways, paneled interiors and nickel-plated doorknobs. In the 1950’s, when booths expanded to sidewalks, they adopted the sleek midcentury style of glass and steel.

Perhaps more than anything, though, the booths simply offered a public, climate-controlled place to make a private call.

If you are one of the few holdouts to the wireless age, conducting your business – legal or otherwise – from a pay phone these days leaves much to be desired. The offspring of the phone booth, referred to as an “enclosure,” is not much more than two metal sides and a phone, which comes in several styles. There are the ones that eat quarters; the ones with stuck buttons; the ones with chewed receivers; and the rare ones that work. All of them leave users with a vaguely unsanitary feeling.

So why did the booths disappear? For several reasons, according to Paul Francischetti, a Verizon vice president. Part of the charm of phone booths was that they were microcosms of the city’s culture. In the 1970’s, New York was crime-ridden and in disrepair. So were the outdoor booths. Addicts used them to shoot up; drug dealers, the modern descendants of the Telephone Booth Indians, as a base of operations.

At the same time, building owners began to look at the indoor booths with a wary eye. Many felt the space could be used more effectively. The final blow came, Mr. Francischetti said, when the Federal Communications Commission deregulated the pay phone industry in 1985, creating fierce competition and a bottom-line mentality. Booths were expensive to maintain. “More than anything else,” he said, “that brought phone booths to the brink of extinction.”

It takes some legwork, but a few booths can still be found in the city. The Waldorf’s are long gone, but the Frick Collection, on the Upper East Side, has one, and the Federal Courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn has a full row of booths, as does the Roseland Ballroom on West 52nd Street.

Several restaurants still have old-fashioned booths, among them Giambone, a sleepy Italian place on Mulberry Street. The owner, Joseph Elias, said the restaurant’s cherrywood booth, which dates to 1914, is used frequently by workers from the nearby courthouse. “Many lawyers come in and make their secret calls,” he said.

It was a rainy evening – perfect phone booth weather – and Mr. Elias stood behind the bar and explained the story of the lone booth. The space was once home to a Western Union office, and when it moved out in 1924, Giambone moved in and the booth stayed. “It fits,” Mr. Elias said.

Inside, there was a wooden bench, a metal fan and a nameplate that said “Western Electric.” Someone had scratched the name “Helen” into the wall. The booth looked warm and inviting. “The phone companies call me sometimes,” Mr. Elias said. “They want me to upgrade to digital. I tell them, no, I’m happy with what I have.”

———–

-Ian.

—— http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/18/technology/18CELL.html

November 18, 2002 Success of Cellphone Industry Hurts Service By SIMON ROMERO

Americans’ use of cellphones has increased so quickly that wireless networks are becoming overloaded, causing a growing number of customers to complain about calls that are inaudible or are cut off or are never connected in the first place.

And things could get worse before they get better, industry experts say, because even as cellphone companies are rolling out fancy features like digital photography and Internet-based games, they are hard-pressed to spend the money needed to improve basic service.

“This is a situation in which the wireless industry is a victim of its own success,” said James D. Schlichting, a deputy chief of the wireless communications bureau at the Federal Communications Commission.

Many of the industry’s service problems are a result of a huge growth of new customers. In 56 percent of the nation’s households, someone now subscribes to wireless phone service, more than double the percentage in 1995.

The surge in users is overwhelming the capacity to handle calls on wireless systems — whether because local transmitters are too few or too small, or because the local airwaves have become too crowded and carriers are unable to obtain larger swaths of radio frequencies.

The problems are compounded by basic economics. Customers have been attracted by the plunge in prices for wireless service. The average per-minute cost has dropped to 11 cents this year from 56 cents in 1995. For the phone companies that has meant a decline in average revenue per customer to $61 a month, from $74 in 1995.

And so, just when the wireless companies need to invest more money to accommodate all those new users, the companies are under increased financial strain.

As a result, the complaints are piling up.

The F.C.C. tracks only the few hundred complaints it receives each quarter — it recently reported fewer than in past years — but acknowledges that an increase in subscribers had worsened service problems. And surveys conducted for the industry itself show that complaints are rising.

“If I make 10 calls, at least three have to be redialed because they don’t go through,” said Orville Mills, who lives near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and recently switched carriers to Sprint from T-Mobile. “The new services are just a distraction from not having the basics down.”

The percentage of all wireless subscribers who have called customer-service centers at least once in the last year to complain about service or because they had other problems has climbed to 61 percent, from 53 percent in 2000, according to J. D. Power & Associates, a company that measures customer satisfaction in many industries and sells it to the companies being scrutinized.

The level of such calls is higher than for many other consumer-service providers, including land-line telephone companies, cable-television operators and stockbrokers, according to Power. About 30 percent of the calls to customer-service centers were complaints related to dropped calls, bad reception or calls not going through, up from 19 percent in 2000. Other reasons included complaints and questions about billing, equipment and services.

The author of the study, Kirk Parsons, said the wireless companies are aware of the problem. He said he expected complaints to grow as the companies add new services, contributing to stress on the networks and subscribers’ confusion.

“It’s important to remember that cellphones are glorified radios,” said Travis Larson, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, the wireless industry’s main trade group. “They’re subject to interference from a lot of things, from building walls to sunspots to the weather. There will always be a trade-off between mobility and call quality.”

Meanwhile, the stock prices of AT&T Wireless Services and Sprint PCS, the two largest stand-alone publicly traded carriers, are down more than 45 percent this year on investor concern about revenues. And the two largest carriers, Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless, which are controlled by regional Bell companies, are struggling to find and pay for additional swaths of airwaves to carry calls.

The industry received something of a financial reprieve last Thursday from the Federal Communications Commission, which ruled that wireless companies would not have to pay the $16 billion they had offered for additional airwave licenses during a bidding process that is now being contested. The licenses had been seized by the F.C.C. from NextWave Communications and auctioned after NextWave filed for bankruptcy protection. But the licenses, and the airwave capacity they represent, are tied up by NextWave’s appeal of that seizure, which is now pending before the Supreme Court.

Another industry problem is the sheer technical complexity of sending and receiving wireless calls. Unlike conventional telephone systems, in which every customer is hardwired to the network, wireless systems rely on a delicate mesh of thousands of antenna towers — which often face resistance from local governments — and cellular relay stations.

The stations can easily be flooded by an increase in calling volumes. That vulnerability became clear in the hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, when the local wireless networks were effectively shut down by the surge of attempted calls.

Various new companies are trying to develop towers and other forms of transmission technologies that could handle such surges. But so far carriers remain reliant on systems that, in some ways, still resemble radio communications networks that were first developed in World War II.

Because of brisk demand, financial problems at wireless carriers are not as severe as those in other areas of telecommunications, where large companies like WorldCom and Global Crossing have sought bankruptcy protection. Even so, some investors think the only way to ensure industry stability will be to winnow the competing wireless players. Instead of six nationwide carriers, they say, a more economically feasible number might be three or four.

“Consolidation among wireless companies can’t fix these problems, but it can make them less severe,” said Frank J. Governali, an analyst at Goldman, Sachs.

For months, investors have been waiting for mergers that would shrink the number of large competitors. No deals have yet materialized, though, partly because of technical obstacles. Unlike nations in Europe and Asia with higher wireless usage rates, the United States does not have a single wireless technical standard that would make it easy for carriers with different systems to combine operations.

Verizon and Sprint, for instance, employ an American-designed standard called code division multiple access, or C.D.M.A. Meanwhile, AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile, formerly known as VoiceStream, use the global system for mobile communications, or G.S.M. format, common in Europe and Asia. Another large American carrier, Nextel, uses its own technology, called Iden.

Carriers have also resisted measures that would make the industry more consumer-friendly. In response to industry lobbying, for example, the F.C.C. has postponed until next fall a deadline for companies to start allowing “number portability” — letting customers keep their cellphone numbers even when they switch providers. The companies are reluctant to implement the measure, fearing it will create new costs while also encouraging customer defections.

“I’ve had the same number for three years,” said Sarah Vanderslice, a student at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who subscribes to Sprint’s service. “The fear of losing it is the only thing that keeps me from dropping my cellular company.”

The F.C.C. has also repeatedly extended the industry’s deadlines for improving emergency-call abilities for wireless phones. Calls from cellphones are still much more difficult for emergency officials to pinpoint than calls from land-line phones. And the issue has become more pressing as the number of emergency calls from cellphones has grown to the current rate of more than 30 percent of 911 calls.

“The wireless industry is in need of a stricter taskmaster,” said David Heim, the managing editor of Consumer Reports magazine, which publishes an annual feature each year on cellular service problems. Although the F.C.C. has jurisdiction on certain operational matters, the wireless industry remains largely unregulated.

But few people expect the Bush administration’s F.C.C. to try to exert significant new authority. And even a former F.C.C. chairman from the Clinton years says that, in the main, it would be prudent to avoid more regulation.

“We have a robustly competitive wireless industry,” said Reed E. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, who is now a senior adviser on information technologies for the management consultant firm McKinsey & Company. “Younger people recognize this in opting for wireless over wire line and putting up with some flaws in exchange for freedom of movement.”

Like their counterparts in Europe, carriers in the United States are hoping new services like text messaging and transmission of digital photos will eventually generate the additional revenue they need to put their finances on stronger footing. But aside from a small but loyal following of mainly younger subscribers that exchange text messages, none of the new services have attracted a large number of users.

And anyone who expects competitive market forces to quickly improve cellphones may be overly optimistic, some experts say. They note that the conventional wired telephone system has been evolving for more than a century and became widely dependable only in recent decades.

“Don’t hold your breath,” said Jeffrey Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst in Atlanta. “Service and the economic evolution of wireless are works in progress — it might be years before customers are truly satisfied.”

‘I’m looking for one million men’

When the results of the latest census were announced this week, it emerged that a million young British men had ‘disappeared’. The man in charge of the count thinks they’re all at ‘raves’ in places like Ibiza. We sent Emma Brockes to the island to find them

Emma Brockes Friday October 4, 2002 The Guardian

A bald man wearing a Napoleon hat is offering me advice. Yes, he says, he has seen what I am looking for. “There,” he whispers and points to a boy ordering tequila at the bar. On the crowded dance floor, another boy, naked from the waist up, is flailing to the music. “And there,” says the man. He is 44 and from Holland. Glitter sparkles on his face. He glides discreetly away from me, into the throng.

I have come to Ibiza in search of one million British men. They are miscellaneous men, aged between 25 and 39, of no particular height, breadth or origin, but they have one thing in common: at the time of the 2001 census, they were mysteriously unaccounted for. It is the opinion of Len Cook, the registrar general, that Britain’s absent million have been sucked into a vortex of European “rave culture” and are missing, presumed brain dead. I imagine I will find them flopped regimentally out on the sand at San Antonio, like the remains of the confederate army after the burning of Atlanta.

This, it turns out, is an unrealistic expectation. In the summer months San Antonio is the clubbing capital of Europe but today, as the rain chucks down, the only joints that are open are the ones playing orchestral arrangements of Moon River and La Vie en Rose. The few visible tourists are the kind who visit Ibiza for its churches. Green and white striped awnings snap in the wind, the sea is an oily grey and the only club with its lights on is a scary-looking place with smoked glass windows called Ground Zero. It is apparent that finding anyone in this depleted resort – let alone Len Cook’s million ravers – will be an achievement.

The first bar we enter flies the Scottish flag and on its wall-mounted television plays video footage of someone having plastic surgery. There is a group of five men of roughly the right age at the bar but they are pink and round-shouldered, like soft-shell crabs, and it is hard to imagine them surrendering their pints for water bottles and devoting themselves to dance music. Derek, 36, says he remembers the census. He shifts uneasily. I assure him I have not been sent by the government. He says he’s pretty sure he filled in the form. In any case, he says, this is his first trip to Ibiza and he’s only here for a week. If he is missing, he’s almost certain he would know about it. Next door, in the photographic shop, the words “British” and “men” send the Spanish owner into nervous retreat. He backs away from the counter, muttering and throwing weird, slanted glances around until we feel forced to leave.

John Hall, music editor and Ibiza correspondent of Ministry magazine, says there is no way a million British men are secreted on the island. “There are probably 3-4,000 and just as many women as men. If they don’t show up on the census, it’s because they’re spending a couple of months here as part of their world tour. DJs and bar staff will move on from Ibiza to Thailand, Asia and Australia. They don’t go home at the end of the season.”

Outside, the wind whips up and the puddles are widening. On the rocks in the harbour, a couple of young men who can only be British are threading pieces of ham on to fishing rods in the hope of catching the meatless black fish that hide in the shallows. They are Rob, a butcher, whose 22nd birthday it is today, and Andy, a 32-year-old delivery driver. They are from Northampton. “I heard of it, I dunno, but yeah I think so,” says Rob. “I never filled nothing in though.”

With his effortless obliviousness to bureaucracy, Rob has the potential to become a successful member of the missing. But for now he is merely an admiring apprentice, on his regular fortnight’s holiday. “They sell CDs on the beach,” he says of the elusive million, wistfully.

And so, we strike out around the curve of the bay, up the main drag, towards the few bars remaining open. We pass Ian, 25, a design engineer from Staffordshire, who says he would kill to sell his house and blow the proceeds on a year in Ibiza, but hasn’t the courage. The M bar is home to Manumission, one of the biggest clubs on the island. A shirtless Argentinean juggles bottles behind the bar while two men bicker over where to buy music decks. They are Ricky and Mickey from Manchester. Ricky is hopping from one foot to the other. His hair is floppy and sun streaked. He wears a pendant round his neck and a cigarette droops from the side of his mouth. Mickey gazes vaguely out to sea. I think I have found my men.

“All right?” says Ricky. I explain what I am looking for. He grins ecstatically. “Here, Mickey,” he says. “Guess what? I’m one of the missing million!”

“Yeah,” says Mickey. “Except, no one’s missed you.”

The two men are DJs. Ricky is 31, Mickey 37. They have been in Ibiza for four months and were here last year at the time of the census. “I had to do a disappearing act, if you know what I mean,” says Ricky cheerfully. “Nothing too dodgy. But I don’t want my photo in the paper. Ha!” He returns to England today, but is thinking of spending the winter in Ibiza, doing construction work. “My flat in Manchester’s gone, ’cause I haven’t paid rent on it for four months. I told my mate to go round and clear out my stuff, but who knows if he’s done it. I’ve definitely got a gig in town on Friday night. But after that, no plans. I might do a tour of all the people I’ve met in Ibiza.”

He and Mickey think it’s a cheek that people back home see them as having taken the easy way out. On the contrary, they say, falling off the radar takes hard work and discipline. Plenty of folk come out from Britain with the intention of staying, but they can’t go the distance. “The young ones don’t last two weeks,” says Mickey.

“It’s like kids in a sweetshop, if you know what I mean by sweet shop. It’s quite funny to see them losing their minds.”

“They come here bright young things and they go home husks, don’t they,” says Ricky. “Some of them are so sick, they’re transparent. This one girl, Rachel, missed three flights in a row that her mum had booked for her to go home.”

The DJ at M is 37-year-old DJ Lucci from Kent. He has spent the past five summers in Ibiza and next year plans to move here full time. “Did you know you can draw the dole here?” he beams. “There are loads like me. It’s hard work and the money’s crap, but we’re here for the vibe. The American DJs think we’re all crazy. But the reason Brits party so hard is because they’re so stressed at work they have to get mashed at the weekend. A lot of the British guys out here, their first priority is drugs, then rent, then food.”

“It’s a collection of lost souls,” sighs Ricky, whose pendant is engraved with the pagan symbol of love. He hopes it will bring him luck in finding his soulmate.

“For fuck’s sake,” says Mickey.

A 20-minute drive from San Antonio is the beach resort of Playa d’en Bossa. Tonight is the closing party for Bora Bora, a seafront club, and in spite of the rain 100 or so regulars have gathered under the awning for one last fling. They are tanned and toned from a summer of dancing. There is glitter in their hair. The man in the Napoleon hat, who has been knocking around Ibiza for years and presumably contributes to the Dutch statistical shortfall, introduces me to John, a decorator from Leicester. John is experimenting with disappearance under the watchful eye of his friend, Yan. “Yan’s bloody mental,” he says admiringly. “He’s twisted. I was getting drunk on Sunday and he called me and said, ‘Let’s go to Ibiza – if we leave now we can be in Space by 3pm.’ So I got a £60 flight one way, and offered to be his record bitch. Yan’s a DJ. He’ll stay out here. But if I don’t go home soon, my brain will be mush.”

Yan has been living in Ibiza on and off for 11 years. He doesn’t believe the island has absorbed a million itinerant British men. “Twenty thousand at most,” he says. “People like me.”

“A fucked-up, drugged-up waste of space?” says John. Yan smiles. “It’s all about happiness,” he says. Yan is 39 and responds to inquiries about his income with a saucy raise of the eyebrows. I leave the two men engaged in a half-dance, half-hug arrangement, while girls around them scale the tables. It has not been a bad night. Of the missing million, I have tracked down four and while they don’t plan to return, they are happy for the guys at the census office to take down their details – just so long as they don’t make them available to the Inland Revenue.

———–

RICHARDSON, Texas — Two years ago, J. Michael Dugan spread the word to his fellow optical engineers in North Texas that he was starting a company that could make them all rich. The telecommunications business was hot, and optical engineers were the hottest commodities of them all, commanding big signing bonuses and six-figure salaries.

Mr. Dugan, a burly Texan with more than 20 years under his belt at the giant French equipment maker Alcatel SA, was persuasive. So many flocked to his annual summer party in July 2000 to learn more about Latus Lightworks that he ran out of food. The start-up took off quickly, hiring 120 employees as the engineers raced to devise ways to squeeze more data and voice traffic through a hair-thin strand of fiber-optic glass.

Then the bubble burst.

A few weeks ago, when all those engineers gathered again in Mr. Dugan’s backyard, it was to commiserate and swap job leads. Ken Maxham, a cheery 59-year-old who comes from a long line of engineers, was worried about his unemployment benefits running out as his savings dwindle. He had cut back expenses as much as possible, but basic health insurance costs $750 a month and his wife was putting off going to the dentist for a toothache.

David Wolf, who at 37 is one of the youngest optical engineers around, was counting the days until his second start-up was due to run out of money. The fresh-faced father of three young children was pruning expenses such as his daughter’s gymnastics lessons and worrying about the future. Mr. Dugan, whose work as a temporary consultant was about to end, was contemplating returning to school at age 50.

And the party was buzzing about a cruel twist of fate: Two of the former colleagues had just gone head-to-head for one of the few remaining telecom jobs out there. The one in the more precarious financial position didn’t get it.

“When I see someone I haven’t seen in a while, my first question is, ‘Do you have a job?’ ” said Bruce Raeside, a 46-year-old Michigan native who also worked as a Latus engineer. “It’s almost like Detroit in the ’70s.”

In many ways, it’s worse. Like the massive declines in the nation’s steel, oil and automobile industries in decades past, the disintegration of the telecom business is leaving deep wounds in the U.S. work force. But labor historians say telecom stands out for the unprecedented speed of the boom-and-bust cycle. After telecom was deregulated in 1996, it quickly expanded by some 331,000 jobs before peaking in late 2000. Since the downturn started, though, companies have announced layoffs that have wiped out all those new jobs and more — a total of well over 500,000 workers, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal. By contrast, it took two decades for the ranks of the United Auto Workers to fall to 732,000 from 1.5 million, as the auto industry was forced to become much more efficient in the face of foreign competition.

The number of telecom jobs grew faster and has fallen much harder than the overall job market, according to James Glen, an economist with Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., research firm. He says the 12% drop in telecom jobs is still gaining steam, especially as the rout claims bigger and bigger companies such as Global Crossing Ltd. and WorldCom Inc. And the economic and human cost of the telecom bust far exceeds that of the highly publicized Internet crash, which by and large involved smaller companies.

Telecom has turned into one of history’s biggest bubbles because so much money poured into the industry during the stock-market boom, creating some $470 billion in debt and a vast glut of capacity. Once a sleepy industry known for its modest growth, telecom took off like a rocket in the late ’90s as companies rushed to lace the world with ultra-fast fiber-optic networks to carry an expected onslaught of Internet traffic. But after a frenzy of spending and hiring, it suddenly became clear in mid-2001 that the Internet wasn’t growing nearly as fast as the 1,000-fold annual increases originally predicted. The huge run-up has now been replaced by a merciless ride down. Rumors of foreclosures and marital problems have replaced word of the latest IPO. Some laid-off telecom workers are even turning up in local homeless shelters.

So much money was spent buying telecom gear during the frenzy that there is now seven years’ worth of excess inventory, says Lonnie Martin, chief executive of White Rock Networks, a Richardson start-up that is trying to hang on. He values the excess supply at some $160 billion. “That is an awful lot of exuberance to get rid of,” he says.

There are few places where the hangover is more severe than here in the sun-blasted plains north of Dallas. Back during the boom years, developers couldn’t throw up office buildings fast enough to keep pace with the demand. Telecom jobs doubled to 90,000 between 1995 and the peak of the bubble as big names such as Cisco Systems Inc. stormed into town and companies such as Nortel Networks Corp. quadrupled their work forces. Money was flowing so freely that countless start-ups emerged from nowhere. Now, vacancy rates in the area known as the Telecom Corridor have shot up to 34%. The vast expanses of empty parking lots make the area look like a corporate ghost town.

And the layoffs keep coming. While the Latus workers left stable jobs to join the start-up, they know plenty of colleagues who stayed behind and lost their jobs anyway. Big suppliers such as Nortel and Alcatel had already shed half their work forces before WorldCom’s collapse. Xalted Networks Inc. just laid off most of its Texas engineers and issued a press release saying it’s moving its software development to Bangalore, India, where it plans to hire 70 engineers in a bid to conserve cash.

Change of Fortune

The change of fortune is especially jarring to telecom’s engineers, many of whom chose their profession because it promised a stable paycheck and seemingly limitless growth. Mr. Dugan, who has degrees in physics and electrical engineering, shifted into telecom after down-sizings in NASA’s space program and the Texas oil industry, where he built support electronics for the oil diggers. Mr. Raeside came on after surviving layoffs at semiconductor companies through the 1980s.

During the boom, no one was more in demand than the eclectic band of optical engineers who had worked for years in relative obscurity transmitting millions of calls a second through tiny hairs of glass by using lasers of light invisible to the human eye. Their value soared in a climate where any innovation could quickly become the next hot IPO. Suddenly, companies were paying salaries well over $100,000 to lure top talent.

As some of the early start-ups were purchased by bigger companies in deals that made their founders rich, the walls of the big companies started to feel a bit confining. Mr. Dugan left Alcatel in January 2000, contemplating a few offers. He was hanging around his house one February morning when he was contacted out of the blue by Michael Zadikian, who had sold his company, Monterey Networks, to Cisco Systems Inc. for $500 million in 1999.

Mr. Zadikian had a new plan to launch four start-ups at once to develop a single system that phone companies could use for all of their needs. He wanted Mr. Dugan to focus on the so-called long haul, the cross-country and undersea networks that companies were racing to build. Mr. Dugan signed on.

Latus was following in a rich tradition. The former MCI Communications Inc. started here in the late ’70s, using the microwave technology deployed by Collins Radio to challenge AT&T Corp.’s monopoly. But microwave towers couldn’t be placed more than 35 miles apart because of the curvature of the earth, leading MCI to push for advances in fiber-optic technology. In the early ’80s, MCI embraced a new technology that used light waves to transmit calls on one strand of fiber, a signal that was so strong MCI only needed to install equipment to boost it every 1,000 miles or so. Companies rushed into Richardson to help give MCI a competitive edge, a customer and supplier relationship that has flourished for years, but which is now in jeopardy with the collapse of MCI’s parent, WorldCom.

The goal of Latus was ambitious: to develop a system that could send data and voice traffic at higher speeds and longer distances than ever before. Optical networking was all abuzz about a technology called dense wave division multiplexing that could divide a single strand of fiber into dozens of channels by beaming different colors of light through it. The Latus system had 256 different channels, and was designed to go more than 1,200 miles before the signal needed to be boosted again so it could continue on.

The company didn’t have a name until March, when Mr. Dugan, flying home from a convention, bought a Latin-English dictionary at an airport and found the word, “latus,” meaning wide, open and expansive. Latus got $28 million in its first round of funding in July of 2000 from a group of investors eager to follow Mr. Zadikian’s success.

David Wolf knew he was at a turning point as he decided whether to follow his former boss to Latus. A friend of his late father told him to do it because it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. His wife, Susan, advised making the leap as well. The couple had just purchased some property north of their home in Allen, Texas, to build a bigger house to accommodate their expanding family.

“Do it, as long as you get paid the same,” Susan told her husband. Even if it didn’t work out, the couple reasoned that Mr. Wolf could take advantage of one of several other job offers. In a matter of days, Mr. Wolf found himself plunking down $5,000 on his credit card to buy a laptop so he could start work at Latus on Monday. He remembers thinking with amusement that there were no expense forms to fill out to get the money back, but he trusted Mr. Dugan.

They found some office space to rent and began hiring workers. “At every board meeting, they said, ‘Spend the money. Spend the money,’ ” recalls Mr. Wolf. “The engineers were the hardest to find.” Latus had to pay at least $100,000 and as much as $120,000, plus bonuses, for the very senior engineers, who often were playing more than three job offers off each other. The start-up handed out 20% of its total shares to employees, and those who joined first were given the largest number of options. Another start-up raffled off a new BMW to employees who referred their colleagues to the company.

Money seemed to be everywhere — and in many senses, it was. Capital spending by telecom companies at the height of the boom soared to 106% of revenue, according to Mr. Glen at Economy.com. Historically, that figure had been just 38%.

At Latus, Ken Maxham jumped in as employee No. 11, Bruce Raeside as employee No. 16 and Amy Dugan as employee No. 47. Mrs. Dugan joined despite some nervousness about perceptions of nepotism. A respected engineer herself, she reasoned that joining her husband’s company meant the two could work day and night on Latus.

The scramble began to get the technology ready for viewing at Supercomm, a huge trade show in June of 2001. The engineers sometimes put in 20-hour days working out kinks in the product, which looked like a bunch of refrigerators full of wires. “Our entire existence was hinged on meeting our claims,” says Mr. Dugan. “I said there is no way we can go back and tell the board there appeared to be fundamental physics limitations.”

What they didn’t realize was that economic limitations would prove the bigger threat. Latus was launched precisely at the peak of the bubble, when money was flowing so freely in telecom that companies seemed willing to buy anything.

It was at Supercomm in Atlanta that the big buyers began showing signs of flagging demand. Mr. Dugan had to rush out to California in the middle of the show to give a funding pitch to one of the original investors. But the second round of financing for Latus became almost impossible as the spigot of capital shut off. An initial public offering became a distant dream.

Mr. Dugan was hoping the uncertainty was just a slight fluctuation in the market. That summer, the Dugans threw an even bigger party than before, and catered it for the first time, bringing in trays of Mexican food under a huge rented tent. Around that time, Susan Wolf started joking with Mr. Dugan about whether her husband would still be able to bring home a paycheck. An accountant, she works only during tax time to bring in a few thousand dollars. Mr. Dugan knew it was a joke, but he began feeling the responsibility on his shoulders.

The first layoffs hit the Richardson area in the middle of 2001. Susan Wolf began hearing stories in her neighborhood. “It is like the black plague. You hear it happening to someone your neighbor knows. Then her brother is laid off, and then it happens to you,” she told her husband over dinner recently with a guest. “It goes from the edges in — closer and closer — and finally gets here.”

The company was notified that it lost its funding the morning of Sept. 11. Mr. Dugan was waiting for a conference call among the Latus board when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, but the call went on as investors notified them that funding would be cut off. The founders were given only 10 days to find a new backer — an almost impossible feat because any potential bidders would have had to travel by bus to visit the company, since all flights were grounded for days by terrorism fears. “We got bombed twice,” says Mr. Dugan, who doesn’t blame the investors for their decision given the climate.

On Sept. 12, he called an all-hands meeting and told his fellow Latus employees to update their resumes and finish their projects. “It’s not over, but it doesn’t look good at all,” he told them.

On Sept. 23, Mr. Dugan invited them all to the local Omni Hotel, the place where all the deals were made during better times. He told them that Latus would be shut down, and its doors padlocked as the bank cleared out its equipment. Everyone would lose their jobs immediately. Mr. Dugan made arrangements to sign them up for unemployment benefits on the spot, and then the Dugans paid for drinks for all. “A lot of these people were my friends. They didn’t hold it against me,” says Mr. Dugan. “But I felt badly for them.”

When Latus shut down, the Wolf family cut down on spending as they could. They stopped hiring babysitters and going out to dinner, and cut back on groceries.

David Wolf stayed at home looking for a job, surprising his children the first time that he picked them up from school. To fill his time, to the slight irritation of his wife, he plunged into another start-up with Mr. Dugan and a few others to develop another optical product. They even paid out of their own pockets for Mr. Dugan to present the product at a show in California earlier this year. But with the downturn so pronounced, they received little interest. The fiber-optic amplifier is now sitting in a case in Mr. Dugan’s living room.

As he flung himself into a new start-up, Mr. Dugan and others held meetings at the local Starbucks, which had become the unofficial meeting place for the unemployed. He says it is a strange experience to run into people during the middle of the day. “It is like, ‘Oh, this happened to you, too,’ ” he says.

Mr. Maxham started looking for a job immediately. Even though he is 59, he was perhaps worst off financially because he had invested 30 years of retirement savings in tech stocks after leaving Alcatel. “I was a believer, but that was a bad decision,” says Mr. Maxham, who lost “hundreds of thousands” of dollars. Initially, he was mystified by the scarcity of jobs because he had turned down seven job offers before joining Latus. As he searched every day for jobs, unemployment benefits of about $300 a week kicked in.

To ease the tension, Mr. Maxham plays electric bass guitar in a band of engineers called Signal2Noise. But it wasn’t much of an escape: At one point, half of the band was out of work. He felt increasingly guilty about his precarious financial situation and apologized at one point to his wife, Penny. “I am not angry,” she told him. “I sort of know that we are going to be OK.” Still, it was rough recently when she had to accept money from her parents to travel back to Idaho to visit them.

For months now, the bottom has been getting deeper. Robert Shapiro, head of the local telecom branch of the national engineering association, thinks the cycle must be at the bottom. “How could it get any worse?” asks Mr. Shapiro, who is working a temporary job after months of unemployment. Attendance at the group’s monthly meetings at the local Holiday Inn has doubled since engineers now have extra time. Mr. Shapiro estimates that half of the association’s members have been laid off. Meetings now start with job-hunting tips.

Part of the problem is that there is no place for the highly specialized engineers to turn as the tech industry continues to slump. Krish Prabhu, the former chief operating officer of Alcatel who lives in the Dallas area, hears the desperation as companies ask for money and former colleagues call for job tips. A partner with Morgenthaler Ventures, a venture-capital firm, Mr. Prabhu says it will be tough for any start-up to survive. “There is a nervousness about whether this downturn is part of a cycle or a fundamental change that telecom has become a commodity like the computer industry,” says Mr. Prabhu.

The ripples are spreading. The city of Richardson is being hit by a drop of more than 20% of its sales tax and a coming hit to its property taxes from all the empty office buildings. Foreclosures in Collin County, where many telecom workers live, are up 79% over last year, especially for homes worth $250,000 or more. The process is brutally efficient in Texas: Once a house is posted for foreclosure, the owner has only 21 days to come up with the money before it is auctioned.

Howard Dahlka, executive director of the Samaritan Inn, a homeless shelter in nearby McKinney, is seeing the shell-shocked faces of telecom workers who have lost their homes. “It is a whole new breed, what we are seeing here,” he says.

People in Trouble

Just in the past week, Samaritan has received 15 calls from people who are expecting to lose their homes, and he worries whether his 58-bed shelter will have to turn people away. Bill Kewin, an engineer who was laid off from WorldCom six weeks ago, says many WorldCom workers are in very bad financial shape because their 401(k) plans are worth virtually nothing. Many have put their homes on the market and don’t know where they are going next. “There are a lot of people who are in trouble,” he says.

As November turned into December, Mr. Dugan had found no work. His wife, Amy, thankfully did land a job for $100,000 a year at a telecom manufacturer, giving them a degree of financial stability they are grateful for. But it isn’t easy for Mr. Dugan, who has 13 patents to his name. He eventually got a little work consulting for a start-up, but expects to lose that job in about a month. Something permanent feels pretty far off. He’s even thinking of going back to school to study medicine. “I don’t have a sense of accomplishment,” he says. “I still have more to do.”

Across town at the Wolf household, tension rose as Christmas approached and David still didn’t have a job. The couple fretted about Christmas, and how to contribute to the gift-giving rituals with their extended family. They didn’t want to ask for help but were happy to accept cash gifts to help ease the pinch. Susan Wolf was most worried about the $10,000 bill for private school for one of their children with some special needs. Her parents stepped in to help foot the bill late last year.

Finally, in January, David got a job at Yotta Networks, another local start-up that is focusing on long-haul networks. He makes about $100,000 a year, but Yotta has gone through two sets of layoffs and is set to run out of its funding in a matter of weeks. Company officials are negotiating with a promising new customer, but the start-up is burning through $1 million a month.

The Wolfs estimate they have only enough savings to last three months. “I’m getting nervous,” says Mr. Wolf. “I’ve got a lot of people who are telling me just to get out of telecom. I don’t want to end up on the street again.” Susan Wolf says that if she needs to, she will resort to anything to pay this year’s school tuition. “I’ll move into an apartment if I have to.”

In April, Mr. Maxham thought his prayers had been answered. A company called Celion Networks Inc. needed an engineer. He quickly called to arrange an interview. Then a friend tipped him off that Mr. Raeside, his old colleague from Latus, was also in the running for the job. After agonizing the day before the interview, he decided to deal with the competition head-on. “I put a good word in for him,” says Mr. Maxham.

He felt the interview went well. The job seemed like a perfect fit. They needed a systems engineer — a big-picture guy who supervises the hardware design of a new product. But while he was waiting to see if he’d get another interview, the phone rang with some disquieting news. It was Mr. Raeside, letting him know as a courtesy that he’d been asked back for a second interview. He called again when he got hired.

The two men remain friends, but Mr. Raeside seemed sheepish when he spotted him this year at Mr. Dugan’s party. “I was lucky,” he said softly. “I am really convinced that it came down to either one of us. We were both perfect for the job.”

The job only lasted four months. Mr. Raeside was laid off on Friday.

The party itself was much tamer this year. Guests were asked to bring potluck dishes, and the biggest attraction was a big tent Mr. Dugan designed himself to save money.

Mr. Maxham attends job workshops run by various churches in the area. As every week passes, he notices more and more of the unemployed coming. Lisa Miller, the executive director of Career/HiTech Connection, the biggest workshop in the area, makes it her mission to keep spirits high. “You will find a job,” Ms. Miller told the crowd packing the Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church one recent Tuesday night as she explained the importance of networking. But as the telecom crisis deepens, Mr. Maxham becomes less convinced there are even jobs to be had. He sat with a grim look one recent night as job openings were called off, none of them for engineers.

As Mr. Maxham’s savings account dwindles to under $10,000, things are getting very shaky. He now buys only food that is on sale, looks for the cheapest gas and has put off replacing his wife’s 10-year-old car. He won’t go to a food bank because he says they give away too much meat, which he doesn’t like. Repairs are going undone. Recently, Mr. Maxham set out with sealant to repair some leaks on his roof. If he doesn’t find any work by September, he says that money will “get very tight.”

It already has. Penny Maxham says that she is trying to ignore a toothache because the couple has no dental coverage. She quit her job a couple of years ago to fulfill a dream of getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience, but she is considering going back to work.

Once there was a time when Mr. Maxham vowed never to leave engineering. His father was an engineer, and his three grown children are engineers. But a month ago, Mr. Maxham’s unemployment benefits ran out, and he is reconsidering. He recently applied to teach physics at a community college. A friend recently asked him to help install some computers in cars. He is open to anything because he really needs the money.

“It’s frustrating,” says Mr. Maxham, who in his 30 years as an engineer earned seven patents. An eighth just arrived in the mail last week. “I just enjoyed being an engineer so much. I was born like that and I passed it along to my children. … But maybe I will become a teacher, just like my dad did in the Depression.”

Write to Rebecca Blumenstein at rebecca.blumenstein [at] wsj [dot] com1

Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) mailto:rebecca.blumenstein [at] wsj [dot] com (2) <http://online.”>http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10281640071014240,00.html>http://online. wsj.com/article/0,,SB10281640071014240,00.html (4) <3887 https://ianbell.com/2002/07/27/heres-a-story/ Sun, 28 Jul 2002 02:25:17 +0000 https://ianbell.com/2002/07/27/heres-a-story/ Let’s imagine it’s 1999. You’re the CEO of the world’s largest media conglomerate, happily leeching money from your cable news network, your britney spears sound-alike franchise, and a few dozen feature films (among other things) and turning a respectable profit in the process. Times are good, you’ve relegated Ted Turner to his penthouse live-in office in Atlanta, and you’re dabbling in the local Cable TV services market; but no one seems to care.

When they fired him they triggered a clause in his contract that stipulates that they have to pay him $32K per month FOR LIFE. Crazy.

So if he has the balls to show up, he’ll be in Bankruptcy court alongside all of Webvan’s legitimate suppliers, trying to stake a claim on some percentage of the process from the sale of WebVan’s assets.

Any guesses who might buy those assets? I’m betting on Safeway-TESCO.

-Ian.

———- http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20010709/tc/webvan_bankruptcy_6.html

Monday July 9 12:34 PM ET

Online Grocer Webvan Shuts Down

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Online grocer Webvan Group Inc. (NasdaqNM:WBVN – news) closed Monday and said it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from its creditors.

The decision will lay off 2,000 employees and terminate the Foster City-based company’s service to 750,000 active customers in seven markets – San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago and Portland, Ore.

Launched in mid-1999, Webvan had been one of the Internet’s highest profile businesses. Promising to revolutionize the supermarket industry by taking orders online and delivering groceries to customers’ homes, Webvan had raised about $800 million from venture capitalists and Wall Street.

But the company never came close to making money, losing $830 million since its inception.

“We are very proud of what we accomplished,” Webvan spokesman Bud Grebey said in an interview Monday. “We do believe we had a brilliant concept. We were just ahead of our time.”

Webvan’s board voted to close the company Friday, Grebey said, but didn’t start closing its distribution centers until Sunday. Webvan also pulled the plug on its Web site Sunday.

Each of the company’s hourly workers will receive their earned wages, accrued vacation plus a $900 gift from an anonymous donor, Grebey said. Salaried workers will receive their bonuses for the first half of the year, as well as earned wages and accrued vacation.

Although Webvan had pledged to weather the dot-com downturn, the company’s collapse didn’t come as a surprise. The company has pulled out of three markets – Atlanta, Sacramento and the Dallas area – in an effort to conserve its dwindling cash reserves.

Webvan had warned that it needed an additional $25 million by March 2002 to stay open, but a downturn in customer orders during the past three months forced the company to burn through even more money than management anticipated.

As of June 30, Webvan estimates it had $38 million to $40 million in cash, down from roughly $100 million on March 31.

The company plans to file for bankruptcy in the next week or two, Grebey said. Under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge, Webvan will draw up a plan for repaying its creditors.

Webvan listed liabilities totaling $96.5 million as of March 31 in its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Webvan dealt with 75 distributors and 500 vendors, according to its SEC filings.

The company’s list of unsecured creditors will include Webvan’s former CEO George Shaheen, who resigned in April, triggering a clause in his contract that required the company to pay him $31,250 per month for the rest of his life. With the bankruptcy, Shaheen “will have to get in line with the rest of our creditors,” Grebey said.

To pay its creditors, Webvan plans to sell its remaining assets. The company had invested heavily in a network of huge distribution centers to support its delivery service. The largest centers, spanning roughly 350,000 square feet, are in Carol Stream, Ill., Suwanee, Ga. and Oakland, Calif.

The bankruptcy represents a final blow for Webvan’s devastated shareholders. The company’s market value has plunged by $7.2 billion since Webvan’s November 1999 initial public offering at $15 per share. The stock peaked at $34 shortly after the IPO, but has been stuck below $1 per share all of this year. The stock’s last trading price Monday was 6 cents per share.

In a sign of the company’s desperation, Webvan’s shareholders last month approved a 1-for-25 reverse stock split in a last-ditch effort to boost the shares above $1 and avoid being delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Anyway, what’s afoot right now is a major hellstorm of flame email targeted at this moron. He made a big mistake when he took a piss on Canada. His email is WoodyPaige [at] aol [dot] com . Make it hurt. Pass it on.

-Ian.

—- http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,111%7E20077,00.html

By Woody Paige Denver Post Sports Columnist

Thursday, April 12, 2001 – Woe is Canada.

I feel sorry for Canadians.

“Canada is a country where nothing ever seems to happen,” wrote author Carol Shields. “A country you wouldn’t ask to dance a second waltz.” A country that rarely has a team in the second waltz of the playoffs.

Other than arguing over which language to speak, hockey is the national pastime.

Yet, a Canadian hockey team hasn’t won an NHL championship since all the people spoke Iroquoisese, eh?

And that streak won’t end this year.

Three of the four Canadian clubs in the playoffs will be eliminated in the first round, and the only reason there won’t be a four-gone conclusion is that Toronto is playing Ottawa. One must advance – and will be dumped in the second round.

Take the Vancouver Caknuckleheads. Please. They open the postseason tonight at The Can against the Colorado Avalanche.

Vancouver’s Marc Crawford, who used to coach a talented team, is reduced to rolling out goons, buffoons and Princess Dyes. Three Vancouver forwards – and the all-important assistant equipment manager – have dyed their hair blond before the first game. The Avs must be scared out of their sweaters. The Caknuckleheads are going to try to dazzle ’em with their ‘dos.

Given the brute style of hockey the Caknuckleheads prefer to play, Avalanche coach Bob Hartley would be wise not to to risk injury by scratching Ray Bourque, Rob Blake, Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg and Patrick Roy (none of whom has gotten a roots tint) and let the Hershey Bears win four in a row.

The Caknuckleheads, making a playoff appearance for the first time in five seasons, are missing Markus Naslund and Andrew Cassels and don’t know whether to start Bob Essena or Dan Cloutier in goal. Doesn’t matter. The Avs won’t take pity on either. The only edge Vancouver has is that Crawford’s hair is more stylish than Hartley’s. The Avalanche management doesn’t even have to short-sheet Crow’s bench. The only exciting matchup in the series is Crawford vs. Pierre Lacroix.

Can’t we get this over with and get on with a good United States opponent?

North Dakota calls itself “The Peace Garden State” because there is a peace garden (which reportedly blooms one weekend in July) on the border with Canada, as if we have to worry about peace with our northern neighbors, who still bow to a queen who lives on a distant island. Canada may be the world’s second-largest country in land mass, but a U.S. invasion and takeover would be finished by brunch.

Like this series – which will be over after three games and six minutes into the fourth.

Once again, by the conference finals, Canadians will be innocent bystanders, cheering only for Don Cherry’s outfits and outbursts.

The NHL is too wound up about expanding the playoffs when, instead, the league should be aiding and abetting Canada.

If it weren’t for Canada, where would so many of us have hidden out during the Vietnam War?

There should be realignment to give the Canadians, including the Canadiens (and their new Colorado owner), hope in the postseason.

Canada should an occasional prospect for reclaiming the Stanley Container.

As always, I’m here with a solution.

Divide the league into four conferences – North, South, Midwest/West and Canada.

North: Buffalo, Boston, New York Islanders, New York Rangers, New Jersey Devils, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

South: Washington, Carolina, Nashville, St. Louis, Dallas, Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Florida.

Midwest/West: Minnesota, Chicago, Colorado, Phoenix, San Jose, Los Angeles, Anaheim and Columbus.

Canada: Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.

The top four teams from each conference – a total of 16, same as now – would move onto the playoffs, with Nos. 1 and 4 and 2 and 3 meeting in the opening round.

For instance, the conference champion, Colorado, would play Phoenix, and San Jose would play Los Angeles.

After two intraconference series, the winners would reach the conference finals.

What’s different? Canada annually would be guaranteed of sending four teams to the playoffs and would be assured of having one in the conference finals, with a 50 percent chance of being represented in the Stanley Cup Finals. As an example, this year it could have been the Avalanche from the Midwest/West, Dallas from the South, Detroit from the North and Ottawa from the Canada conferences.

Canada would alternate in the conference finals against the other three.

There.

Otherwise, Canadians are forced to watch ice fishing and curling in May and June.