Re: BEg2 chapter 5 - “Winnie List”

[Michael Bailey]

BE is a work of fiction so it’s okay to have fictitious references (imho)


It’d be cool if employers thought so too (-;




On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 5:16 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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”)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>