Five years, my brain hurts a lot

It's been five years since I lost my last job.

Some of you may remember the story. We all knew the company was in trouble, but few employees figured we'd be completely out of business so soon. As the story goes, we'd set the all-time record for advertising pages in a magazine during 2000, and had posted revenues of $200 million that year; how the heck could we be out of business eight months into 2001? Sure, we catered to dot-coms, but most of them were going out of business because they weren't making any money. But we were making money... weren't we?

What killed our company, then? It was the other same old story -- we grew too fast and expected too much. Commercial real estate in downtown San Francisco was going for $85 a square foot in those days. We signed up for enough office space to support 500 employees. After our advertisers started going out of business, we had something like 180 employees. Who was going to sublet that space from us? No one, which is the biggest reason of many why we fell so far back into the red. (The notorious CRM initiative didn't help either.)

We had been sent on mandatory vacation during the week it all hit the fan. (I know, the writing was on the wall, right?) As a result, we all found out in different ways that our careers had stalled that Thursday afternoon. Apart from the handful of top management who were privy to all the details, the first employees to find out happened to be in the office that day. A Wall Street Journal story tipped them off, and then the phone tree started going nuts. My editor called me at 2:45, but....

I was somewhere between Jackpot and Wells, Nevada, when I tuned in an AM station out of Salt Lake City that had CNN's news feed. It was 4:00 Mountain time, but 3:00 Pacific (the time zone which I'd just crossed into, southbound from Idaho), when the announcer said it. "This just in from San Francisco: Famous for its rooftop parties...."

I'd left West Yellowstone, Montana at about 9:30 MDT that morning, and had taken a fairly leisurely drive through Idaho, stopping in thrift stores and checking out little towns along the way. The road south into Nevada is open desert, with only one "town" -- Jackpot, a sad little outpost which exists only to service Idaho residents who like to gamble -- along the way, so I was at my most isolated point in the entire trip when I got the news. The middle of nowhere doesn't afford much comfort in a dark hour, I'm afraid. (I wonder what Ray Manzarek would think.)

I'd booked a Best Western in north central Nevada for that night, but I realized that staying there would turn out to be a mistake. (What was I going to do, pace around my $75 hotel room all night trying to figure out why I wasn't still driving? Tell my stupid dot-com sob story to a bunch of copper miners? Forget it.) And so it went: Seventeen and a half hours after leaving Montana, I was unwinding at home, reading the papers online and trying to figure out how it all happened.

A couple of weeks later, the planes hit the buildings and we all (most of us, anyway) got our priorities straight. I freelanced for awhile, took another road trip through the Southwest, and came home to a successful job interview in February 2002. I can't argue with the results since then -- I'm a decent journalist now, with a fairly stable job (cross fingers) and an excellent work-at-home situation. It's not bad. But still, what was my best job ever? Probably the one that took me from the mailroom to a weekly column in six months, handed me a glass of top-shelf bourbon every Friday, and taught me how to be a pro at this. I'll drink on the roof to that.