BE Cover

[Rev'd Seventy-Six]

An old college mate of mine, Christian Wanamaker, useta regularly regale me
with tales of physically wrangling the data center here in Atl:  emergency
patches in the witching hour, hauling whole arrays from one building to the
next in the summertime after the ACs sprang coolant leaks...

(I didn't even realize where the G was officed, officially, until I passed
him on a bill run downtown.  He was having a smoke break.  My presence
there confused him, too, because he couldn't get his head 'round my habit
of paying bills in person.  He really Bought In to the internet, you see,
unlike me.)

He survived all that nonsense & went on to help establish the Goog in
Dublin.  Nowadays he's jetsetting around Europe juggling code.  If I ever
hear from him nowadays the stories are deadly boring, peppered with
in-jokes in ineffable jargon, consisting largely of failures to outdrink
foreign techs.

When we first met in '97 he was deadset on graduating as a lit major with
delusions of being a Faulkner.  Given the way these devil boxes have eaten
his brain I wonder if he wouldn't have been better off, but I guess the
coin's green?

All I know is I'm glad he failed to convince me to start drawing with a
digital tablet.
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