Re: BEg2 chapter 5 - “Winnie List”

[Michael Bailey]

June 15, 2007
>From the Netslaves Archives: The Story of Jane

I've been digging through old CD-R disks in search of Steve Gilliard's lost
writings for Netslaves
<http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/netslaves/index.shtml>. I figure it will
take at least a year to locate all this material, and probably a decade to
re-format it for the Web. Still, I think I owe it to my old pal to bring
his lost writings back online. In the meantime, I'm discovering other
artifacts from the Netslaves project that never made it online. Here is
such an artifact: the story of an HTML programmer who worked for a
corporation known as "Edler-Watson." This story was actually based on the
memoir of someone who worked at Time-Warner's Pathfinder
<http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/index.shtml>, but back
in those days we changed the names because we were afraid of being
blacklisted in Silicon Alley.

The Story of Jane
Jane Dantzig thought that she had seen it all. She’d worked in New York’s
fast-paced New Media industry for a year, and paid her dues in high-tech
sweatshops from Chelsea to Broad Street. Jane was a freelance HTML coder –
a production grunt – one of the thousands of invisible people whose job it
is to build, maintain, and refresh commercial Web sites so that the titanic
dreams of their visionary masters can be realized, instead of sputtering to
a halt on a broken link or a badly placed "DIV" tag.

Jane liked doing HTML – it would never make her rich, but it paid the
bills. And she liked the independence the freelance life gave her even
more. By being free to choose her clients, she could regulate the bullshit
in her life, and control her destiny in a way that no full-timer, chained
to the fate of her company, ever could.

Jane worked hard, didn’t goof off, rarely fucked up, and never kissed ass.
But the mere fact that she controlled her destiny didn’t mean that she
ruled Fate. And when Fate, in the guise of Challenger, Edler-Watson’s
gigantic Web site, offered her a three-month production assignment in the
Fall of 1995, Jane took the job.

It was a decision that led her into the Stygian depths of hell itself, and
culminated in the single greatest disaster in the annals of New Media. For
a brief 15 seconds that shocked the world, technology, human will, and
reality itself suffered a simultaneous, cataclysmic failure whose
ramifications are still being felt today.

It was the Day the Web Stood Still.

Hands-On
Jane’s long road to disaster began when she accidently injured the left
foot of her African Grey Parrot, who had let himself out of his cage, and
had mischievously alighted on the top of her bedroom door. The door closed,
the bird howled with pain, and Jane immediately rushed the parrot, whose
name was "Mr. URL," to the Animal Medical Center on 92nd street. X-Rays
proved the bird’s mashed leg wasn’t broken, and Mr. URL was released within
two hours, which made Jane, who felt horribly guilty, feel a bit better.
But Mr. URL’s emergency treatment would cost Jane $320, and this was enough
to send Jane’s carefully calculated personal economy into disarray, because
she just didn’t have the money.

Jane blamed herself for always being short on cash, but it was part and
parcel of the freelance life she’d been living for about a year. Formerly
employed as a full-time professional typesetter, Jane had given up the
steady life of twice-monthly paychecks to pursue a Web builder’s career at
age 28. Because she knew page design inside and out, and had figured out
that HTML was a much simpler page description language than the cryptic
markup tags she’d been using for years to compose business forms, she quit
her job and set up her own design shop, called “Rational Bits” in early
1995.

Although freelance site building provided Jane with a much higher hourly
income than she’d made as a typesetter, she still found it difficult to
make ends meet. Jane didn’t spend extravagantly, nor did she pay more than
$1,000 a month in rent for her 1-bedroom on Waverly Place. The problem lay
on the supply side of the equation: in the fact that many of her clients
held on to her invoices for months, or sometimes didn’t pay at all.

By the fall of 1995, Jane’s accounts receivables were about $9,000 – about
half of this from a slick uptown design house that built Web sites for
several international petrochemical companies that, as far as Jane knew,
weren’t hurting for cash. She’d hassled her debtor for two months, received
plenty of promises, apologies, and assurances – but no check.

Another small startup that Jane built sites for went belly up after its
largest client went broke, and never paid Jane the $5,000 she was owed.
With her quarterly self-employment taxes coming due September 1st, Jane’s
bank account was approaching zero, and she feared that she’d soon be unable
to even afford parrot food, which meant she’d have to keep Mr. URL alive on
pizza crusts.

"That’s not going to happen, sweetie, don’t you worry”, Jane said, as the
parrot balanced on his good leg and made clicking sounds that sounded
exactly like her keyboard.

Scanning The List
In the following days, Jane tried hard to drum up some business by
continuously monitoring the job postings that scrolled across the New York
World Wide Web Workers e-mail list. The WWWNY (or “Winnie”) list circulated
among 2,000 Web professionals in New York, and it was a good place to hunt
for freelance assignments. The Winnie list also provided a forum for a lot
of quirky blowhards to rant endlessly about Aggro Software’s browser, or
attack NetScathe’s flaky table support, but Jane tolerated the noise. She
didn’t give a damn about the fate of VRML, or the future of interactivity –
she just wanted to find a short-term job to pay her bird’s medical bill.

Unfortunately, most of the jobs posted to the list that week advertised
intern positions that Jane was overqualified for.
“The fucking interns are ruining the job market”, Jane would complain.”
“Oh no”, Mr. URL answered back.

On Thursday, one listing did appear. It read simply:
HTML Production: Challenger
Long-term freelance opportunity. Must have extensive knowledge of HTML.
Must be familiar with cross-platform, cross-browser compatibilities.
Opportunity to expand your knowledge. Send email to
production at challenger.com


On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 5:01 PM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> https://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/labels/Netslaves.html
>
> Got to scroll down quite a bit.
>
> The pynchonwiki poster, turdraker, looks to’ve copied it verbatim.
>
> The whole site is kinda interesting, imho
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 3:47 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Can you find even a trace of it on the internet *somewhere? anywhere?*. I
>> couldn’t.  And the internet is, sorta, *forever*!!!  And the Pynchonwicki
>> doesn’t provide any backup for that claim.  I mean, this Winnie’s List
>> would have to have been VERY public for it to have worked.  And this wasn’t
>> a market for anything illegal.
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 3:35 PM Michael Bailey <
>> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> That’s what I was thinking too, but apparently there actually was a
>>> “Winnie List” (per Pynchonwiki)
>>> used by people working on the nascent WWW.
>>>
>>> Like a p-list, sort of. Except not for hire. But parts of the
>>> pynchonwiki description ring a bell, I say, speaking as one of the “quirky
>>> blowhards” (-;
>>>
>>>
>>> *Winnie list*
>>> The New York World Wide Web Workers e-mail list — the WWWNY (or
>>> “Winnie”) list — circulated among 2,000 Web professionals in New York in
>>> the web's early days, and was a good place to hunt for freelance
>>> assignments. The Winnie list also provided a forum for a lot of quirky
>>> blowhards to rant endlessly about Aggro Software’s browser or attack
>>> NetScathe’s flaky table support &c &c.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 8:58 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> http://anji.com
>>>> *“Anjie’s List is now Anji.”*
>>>>
>>>> The Winnie List is an obvious reference to  “Anjie’s List” the very
>>>> successful internet handyman-for-hire (cheap) website.  Playing with the
>>>> urban dictionary meaning of a “Winnie,” it is just a silly spoof by Pynchon
>>>> on the whole concept of a day-worker brokerage website, denigrating coders
>>>> into “Winnies” for hire, cheap, via the internet.
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 3:28 AM Michael Bailey <
>>>> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Driscoll Padgett is a freelance Web-page designer, “making it up as I
>>>>> go
>>>>> along, just like everybody else,” also temping as a code writer, for
>>>>> $30 an
>>>>> hour—she’s fast and conscientious, and the word has got around, so
>>>>> she’s
>>>>> more or less steadily in demand,
>>>>> though now and then there’s a gap in the rent cycle where she’s had to
>>>>> resort to the Winnie list, or index cards stuck up next to dumpsters,
>>>>> and
>>>>> so forth. Loft parties sometimes, though that’s usually for the cheap
>>>>> drinks.
>>>>>
>>>>>           The Winnie List?
>>>>>
>>>>>          Mark Kohut pointed me to Urban Dictionary, but it didn’t seem
>>>>> like
>>>>> any of their entries described a nexus for employment, unless I missed
>>>>> something.
>>>>> […]
>>>>> *Winnie list*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> The New York World Wide Web Workers e-mail list — the WWWNY (or
>>>>> “Winnie”)
>>>>>
>>>>