2000

Job Offer

 

Unlike the first interview that kept me waiting for two weeks, Barbara called me back two days later and said they were going to Fed-Ex me the offer and wanted to confirm the address to send the offer letter to.  The next day I got the letter.  The salary was OK, two thousand less than I was currently making at PEC, but I would get a $5,000 signing bonus and 3,500 stock options shares.  Josh was listed as the hiring manager, which I thought was good as he seemed more mellow than Brayton.  I immediately signed it and FedEx ’ed it back the same day. The start date was a little more than two weeks away, March 27th. The following day it felt really good to give my two week notice at PEC
 
I was really excited about the AOL stock options, they were going to make me rich. I had read all sorts of stories in the news about employees of tech startup companies becoming millionaires from their stock options and AOL was one of the leading tech companies.  For those that are not familiar with stock options, let me explain how it works. First you don’t get the stock for free, you have to buy it. What the options do is to let you buy the stock in the future but at the price they were when you got the options.  Assuming the value of the company’s stock goes up, one can make considerable money.  This seemed like a good bet, AOL’s stock had doubled, then split and doubled again several times in the few years the company had been in existence. In December of 1999 AOL shares were worth $94. By March of 2000 when I got my options, they had dropped a bit to $79 a share. Still, I was sure it would go back up and I would make a lot of money.  
 
In my acceptance letter it said my first day I was to report directly to the Head Quarters building for a full day of orientation. I arrived Monday and parked in the parking lot out front and went into the lobby and told the receptionist I was a new hire there for orientation and she look up my name on a list, gave me a pre-made name tag, and told me to go wait over there with the others, pointing to a group of people. A few minutes later a woman came and announced she was from the Human Resources group and would be doing our orientation and to follow her.  It turned out there were about a dozen new hires, which the HR woman said was a pretty typical week. It was a well-organized day although mostly boring. After a short promotional video about AOL, we did all sorts of paperwork, insurance options, flex spending accounts, 401K, and so on and given a stack of papers to review and sign. Lunch of sandwiches were brought in, and it continued into the afternoon. We each had our photo taken and official AOL badges were made that also were key cards to the doors of buildings we were authorized to access
 
When I interviewed, the Internet Services group was located in the datacenter but since then the brand new CC3 building was completed and the group had just moved into it the weekend before I started. The CC3 building was located next door to the datacenter and across the street from the HQ-CC1-2 building.  So the second day of work I report to the brand new CC3 building, entering the lobby and using my key card to go up to the sixth floor where the Internet Services group had just moved to the weekend before.  I exit the elevator on the sixth floor and look around, a maze of five-foot-high cubicles going off to the left and to the right.  Ok, not quite a “Creative Center” I thought, more of “Created Cubicles” like something out of a Dilbert comic strip.
 
I always arrived at work a few minutes after eight and looking around I didn’t see a soul.  Barbara said she would be there, so I wandered around and soon find her in a cubicle across from the VP. I found out later she was the administrative assistant not only for the VP but the entire department. She warmly greeted me, showed me where the office supplies were, and then shows me to my cubicle and tells me that Brayton will be in shortly.  “Brayton?” I said, “I thought I would be working for Josh.”, she says no, they had discussed it and decided I was a better fit in Brayton’s group.  I was a bit surprised as my offer letter listed Josh as the hiring manager, but actually I did like the more technical job with Brayton better.
 
Brayton showed up not long after and spent quite a bit of the morning describing the job in more detail. Internet Services (IS) provide computer hosting services to other groups within AOL. IS had a whole team of web, system, database and network administrators who set up and managed all the servers at AOL. That, I learned later, is a lot of servers, thousands of servers, enough to provide internet services to 30 million users.  I remember the first time I went into the data center, row after row of servers, and that was just one 10,000 square foot room, the DC1 data center had six such rooms, 60,000 sq ft total, and AOL had multiple such datacenters.  IS also provided hosting services to about twenty non-profit organizations. But the biggest thing was just starting with the upcoming acquisition of Time Warner who many different divisions had computers and websites scattered in disparate datacenters around the country. As a projected cost savings to the merger, many of those Time Warner computer systems would be moved to AOL owned datacenters. That would become the main focus of my job.
 
It sounded like great fun to me.  Brayton took me out to lunch that first day and when I returned back to my cubicle, I found the IT person had delivered a laptop, docking station, and monitor to my cubicle. Part of orientation was a list of instructions on how to get set up with access, mail and a few other things so I spent most of the afternoon noon doing that and left the office about 4:45 and was home by 5:15. It was nice to commute against rush hour traffic.
 
The next day I got into work by 8:15 and arrive at my cubicle to find my laptop was gone. Brayton was in his office, so I went in and tell him my laptop is gone. He asks where I last had it and I said I left it in my cubicle when I went home the day before.  He tells me I should always take it with me when I go home as he reaches into his bottom desk drawer and pulls out my laptop.  Ok, I didn’t think it was funny but they gave me a nice computer bag full of accessories so I took my laptop home at the end of each day after that.

Gray Bear Lodge