Chapter 12: It's Not Really a Secret, Victoria

Sally: “How’s your father doing today, Helen?” “It’s hard to say. Sometimes he’s in the Land of Chocolate where all his daughters are still virgins. Other times he gets this distracted look on his face while he pitches a tent in his pants. We love him to death, but Daddy really needs a partner who can rock his world.”

“Let’s get you measured and see what can be fitted to your luscious orbs.” Helen giggled. An hour later, they emerged with five new bras and eight pairs of panties, including three matched sets.” “My sisters will be so jealous! Thank you, fairy godmother!”

“Let’s get some lunch. Then I’ll drop you back at Ed’s.”

As expected, Helen’s new dainties were universally approved. Lisa called out “I’m next!” Teresa was satisfied with her current clothing, and Marianne was going bra-less these days. For her nipples’ sake, she wore soft flannel shirts. Other days, Band-Aids covered her tender nubs.

Lisa called Sally and asked for a similar expedition. “I just have some stretchy old sports bras that aren’t pretty and leave me all lumpy. Please?” “OK, Lisa, we’ll go on Wednesday.”

At home, Cecie and Carl were back on a regular routine. She worked six shifts a week at the diner, while Carl continued with CCS. For the convenience of customers and for sales support, he now worked Saturdays and Sundays. This allowed him two full midweek days to develop his web pages.

He had registered the domain name “watsonmachines.com“ early on and rented space on a hosting site for his prototype pages and experiments. Along with his original HTML skills, Carl had learned style sheets, form processing, and other ways to make his web sites both professional and attractive. Everything passed through Cecie and Sally for review. Their comments on design, color, and readability were tremendously helpful.

Best of all, he received a letter from IBM in Armonk, NY. It turned out that their founder was also named Watson, and they wanted the domain name. In exchange, they offered $80,000 and one of their AIX (Unix) servers.

And so he became webmaster of the carlwatson.com domain and began filling the site with content. And then two things happened that really launched his new career.

First, Sally approached him with a project. “I am leading a non-profit group, the Congress of Veteran Educators Northeast, or CoVEN. We need a web presence, and a confidential discussion board for our membership. We can pay you a management fee. Can you set us up?”

“Sure. Let me get the coven.org domain registered and we can go on from there. Do you have a membership roster? We’ll invite them to create accounts on the new site and set up credit card processing for collecting dues.”

In a couple of weeks, he had coven.org fully operational and Sally established as manager of the site.

The second big event caught the whole world flat-footed. Microsoft had leveraged it’s market clout into spreading its “IIS” web server software everywhere. And left the back door wide open. An attack labeled “Code Red” had swiftly spread across the planet and incapacitated hundreds of thousands of servers.

Carl had no love for Microsoft, so he wasn’t directly affected, but Code Red had long-term implications for the world-wide web. He began marketing himself as an alternative provider of robust services on trustworthy platforms. Stung by Microsoft, many businesses switched to IBM as an established, trustworthy supplier.