Re: BEg2 chapter 5 - “Winnie List”

[David Morris]

This whole story with a story from a CD copy from another defunct site just
sounds like an elaborate fiction.  Can you find anything from outside the
Pynchonwiki?


On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 5:05 PM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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”)
>>>>>>
>>>>>