Chapter 1: Hot Tasty Meaty Lunches

Carl Watson was a nerd. An actual nerd, as designated on his identity badge from Cyber City Stores, his employer. Although he primarily worked on his own, he was a designated member of the CCS Nerd Corps.

From time to time, the whole Nerd Corps would be sent onsite to set up a business office with the latest Pentium II desktop computers and networking. But most of Carl’s work was one PC at a time. And, to be honest, boring. So much had changed since he started playing with computers as a teen. He revived a broken IBM and, over time, added parts and upgrades. By the time he graduated college he was working full-time at CCS and fully independent.

Even so, Carl had other concerns. For one thing, CCS corporate was unhealthy. Customers were no longer buying the maintenance agreements, nor paying big markups for “name” brands. Older PCs were being replaced instead of repaired. Windows seemed to aggravate the problem, often requiring costly re-installation of the OS, the applications, and the user’s files.

As was his habit, Carl took his lunch at the nearby pizza place, where he had his usual mini pie with hot sausage and other tasty meats. He took out one of the tech tabloids regularly mailed to him and began to read.

One article caught his eye. “I could have written this!”

“Future Trends. In coming years Moore’s Law will make PCs a commodity item, and repair services will disappear. Laptops, also generally not repairable, will be the dominant form factor. What will be in high demand are coding skills, particularly for those who are fluent in written English. More and more commerce and information will be on the World-Wide Web, using hyper-text.”

It was a lot to think about. On the way home, he stopped into the big bookstore and perused their technical section. He found several guides to the web, and discovered he needed to learn HTML, the Hyper-Text Markup Language. One of the HTML books included a CD with Netscape Navigator, so he purchased a copy.

At home, Carl indulged in a hot bath and considered his options. He was 25 years old, a college graduate, and single. Because one of his grandfathers was black (the other three were white), he considered himself mixed-race, when he thought of it at all. He rented an “in-law” apartment from an older single widow, a few miles from his CCS job. His prized possession was a Mazda MX-5 Miata sports-car which he called “Mimi.”

He didn’t have a specific self-image. He thought he was very average, weight appropriate for his 5’ 11” height, brown eyes, black curly hair, right down the middle. The most obvious flaw was some patches of psoriasis on his elbows.

And, he was certainly introverted. At work he managed to be friendly and helpful, but internally he found other people exhausting. Partly because they came to him without the slightest understanding of what was wrong with their PCs. One customer had been doing all of their work for 16 months on a single floppy disk. Another had reacted to an out-of-space warning by deleting the contents of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32.

He tried to be positive, yet so often he was taxed to his limits explaining how someone had made their expensive system unusable.

Like many of his peers, Carl had a whole catalog of crazy stories collected from his nerd career.