So like everyone else here at the time, I was an anxious observer of our energy crisis, rolling brownouts and blackouts and it was feeling like the end of the world. And, finally, the bad news about Enron's corporate malfeasance began to come out.

At the same time, because of the techwreck, I'd become addicted to a website called "fuckedcompany.com", reading it every day. Fuckedcompany was started by a very smart young man in New York, and it became a place where people would post about the inner workings of companies as they were going down; not limited to dotcom companies, but focussing on them. The people that worked at these places (or who used to work at these places) would post what they'd seen or heard, report news of layoffs, managerial screw ups and monstrosities, all the inside poop imagineable about customers and ex-customers and clients and contractors and consultants and lawyers.

It was an amazing cultural repository and the comments of the guy who ran it were wicked. It became one of those reputation-economy marvels, where if your company was being talked about on fuckedcompany, it affected your bottom line --- or at least required you to do some damage-control. I learned so much about how people can use the vehicle of business to do evil that it's helped me to manage my mother's money as she slips evere more slowly into dementia...

I didn't wish anybody ill, but I had always known the whole dotcom hysteria was foolishness, and I took a great deal of comfort (not schadenfreude, but comfort) in my inner stance of a kind of silent "I told you so, I told you so" --- and here were the details of how my "I told you so" was working out. So I'd log on to read fuckedcompany every day.