Decision Point

I made it to the gym for some exercise the other day. Although increasingly, "exercise" should be defined as short bursts of activity interrupting long periods of browsing the magazine rack by the elliptical trainers.

The magazines reflect the concerns of the gym's mostly-female clientele: fitness and beauty, fashion, gossip, children. And yet, a fresh copy of the New Yorker appears weekly, looking as out of place as a Wall Street banker in a drum circle.

So I picked up a copy to browse instead of heading back to the Bosu Ball for more ab work as I should have. And found myself reading a profile of yet another youngish, impatient libertarian investor who made billions with Silicon Valley start-ups. Facebook, Paypal, and others.

He founded one company that few have heard of. But I have. I might have gone to work there. We'll call it Octoflex Systems.

This was six or seven years ago. I had dropped out of high tech a while back and spent a couple of years getting a teaching credential and working in the public schools. I probably burned $20K and what I mainly learned was that teaching isn't for me -- a least, not the kind of teaching that involves facing down 30 or 35 grade school kids for six hours a day.

So I started looking for work in high tech again, and it wasn't easy. My skills were dusty -- I'd been a technical writer, but I no longer knew the latest tools, nor did I have subject matter knowledge of the hot technologies.

But I was still a writer, and many successful technical writers never were. They churn out endless field descriptions and procedures to plug into manuals that already exist. But ask them to write an actual overview of the product and how its parts work together -- a "white paper" -- and you don't get much.

Your average human resources department doesn't know or care about such things; so I concentrated on smaller outfits and start-ups that advertised through craigslist.

And I got a few bites. Somebody from Octoflex Systems called me up, and we chatted a bit. He was a techie; Octoflex was a new start-up, too small to even have an HR department.

And the techie told me that Octoflex designed software for drawing information out of vast seas of apparently unrelated data. And that the intelligence community was their biggest customer.

Ooooh-kay. I've tried to stay away from defense-related work, mainly out of ideology but partly because defense contractors aren't wonderful people to work for. But it sounded interesting. And the techie on the line wanted something besides mere product documentation. He wanted to know if I could write white papers aimed at high-level intelligence bureaucrats.

I gave him ten minutes of rap about What A Good White Paper Should Contain, and we parted on good terms. He said I'd hear from them.

No lie. Two days later they called me in for an interview, and it was off to Palo Alto. I don't like long commutes, and Santa Cruz to Palo Alto is a long one and a bad one. But maybe, I thought, I could work at home some of the time. Many companies offer the option.

So I donned my interview clothing and headed over the hill in a car with no air conditioning on the hottest day of the year. By some miracle I got there without sweat stains penetrating the tweed.

Octoflex's offices were up in the mundane part of Palo Alto, away from downtown in a neighborhood that looked like any suburb. I walked in, introduced myself, and the interview was on.

Ninety percent of the staff were top-of-the-line twenty-something software gurus out of Stanford. The kind who write algorithms that millions use daily without realizing it, because the code is hidden inside e-commerce applications, social networking sites, and financial systems. You wouldn't know these guys' names, but they know each other; and the opinion of their peers is all that they care about. Well, money's nice, too.

The young man who herded me through Octoflex was the senior engineer under the development VP. He handled himself with the earnest arrogance of a king nerd, the one who knows he's the best in the world at a job that most people don't even understand.

Octoflex makes -- call it search software. Octoflex's system could look through seas of telecommunication data and from it compile information that, to you and me, wasn't really there. It was all about counter-terrorism -- or so the king nerd told me. That's probably what they told him.

There'd been complaints in Congress about illegal access by the feds of domestic phone calls and email -- all in the name of detecting terrorists. The king nerd assured me, with a superior smile, that if the feds had used Octoflex's software they would have been able to get the same information without breaking the law. Technically.

The best, they told me: nothing at Octoflex but the best people, the best software, the best ideas. They told me I was the only one from the phone screening that they'd bothered to interview. Nobody else had measured up. It was that white-paper spiel of mine; most tech writers don't think that way.

And yet --- I blew the interview. I knew I was blowing it. I could have fixed it, but I didn't want to. Maybe it was the hot day. Maybe it was the killer 50-mile commute -- and, no, working at home was not an option.

Or maybe it was the heroic geek culture at Octoflex. They worked long hours every day and were proud of it. They had a private convenience store on the premises: glass refrigerated cases filled with packaged salads, heat 'n eat meals, ice cream, and every energy drink known to mankind, all free. You weren't supposed to have a life. Or if you did, you were supposed to live most of it on the premises.

You have to be young to think that this is fun. And I'd achieved voting age, at least, before every other person in the building had been born. They still thought it was all an adventure. I knew it was a job. And I already had a life.

But mainly I blew the interview because Octoflex was sleazy. Yes, the best, the very best technology. To spy on public telecom -- legally. To catch the bad guys, only the bad evil foreign terrorists. Yes, we swear, we swear.

As I said, I'm too old. I know where this leads.

They didn't ask me back. But I didn't try to make them want to. There were so many reasons not to want that job. So I made a decision. And that decision affected how how my life played out since that day. That decision ultimately sent me off to a low-paying job that I don't enjoy. And yet that same job gives me plenty of time to be with my sweetie and to have something resembling a life here in Santa Cruz, most beautiful of regions.

So imagine my interest, halfway through reading the New Yorker article at the gym, when I read that Octoflex is now worth "an estimated $2.5 billion dollars." They've come a long way from an office park in the downmarket end of Palo Alto.

If I'd tried to get that job, I might be sitting pretty right now. Or, I might be a burnout with a heart attack and a crappy relationship with Rhumba. I most definitely would have hitched my star to an enterprise that works for people I despise. Octoflex is not only in with the spooks; they're palsy with the big investment banks and hedge funds, too. I'd have to destroy all the mirrors in the house so I couldn't look at myself.

Decision points are interesting. You often don't notice them except in retrospect. You wonder why your life turned out a certain way; and if you wonder long enough and hard enough, you can see the decision point that launched you in a certain direction -- or didn't.

Fifteen or seventeen years ago, I wrote a children's novel. More or less as a lark. And I got it to an agent, and then to a publisher. And prospects looked good. And then it all turned nasty. I didn't get published. My agent quit the business in disgust. That nasty.

So I wrote another one, and I couldn't even get an agent. I could have gone to writers' conferences and tried to connect with an agent or publisher along with thousands of other wannabes.

But self-promotion doesn't come easily to me. And I'm naturally risk averse. And the wonderful world of publishing looked pretty grim and, yes, sleazy. And at the time I was making very good money at a job I could do in my sleep, and expected to keep on doing it for as long as I wanted to.

So I gave up; stopped writing anything but technical manuals. Went with the flow.

And of course the flow didn't take me at all where I expected it to. And here I am, fifteen or so years later, making a third the money in a chaotic job that doesn't suit me and isn't good for me. And I ask myself: where would I be if I hadn't given up, all those years ago, and kept writing? Somewhere else, I think. At least, not exactly here.

I say this because when I actually give myself time to do it, writing is the one thing that makes a humdrum and not-very-satisfying weekday seem worthwhile after all. (Well, except for Rhumba.) Even if all I have to write about is what I saw at breakfast that day.

I think I'm going to make writing a priority. Call this a decision point not in retrospect. And hope for the best.