| June 20, 1999 | Issue 19 | Orem, Utah |
In this issue:
Fathers and Sons
I tried to build Ethan up on the idea for quite a while. He even seemed enthusiastic when we left, but only ten minutes into the drive he started saying that he wanted to go home.
We were setting off on our first camping trip together, as part of the ward annual father and son outing. Our camping place was at Little Sahara, a big field of sand dunes popular with the off-road toy owners. It isn’t too far away, so I figured we’d be able to escape back home if things got really ugly.
Being stuck in traffic just a few miles from home, and Ethan already starting to chicken out made going back home a more real possibility. But we made it through the traffic, and popped open a bag of Doritos for a good distraction.
His requests to go back home were getting pretty desperate until, mercifully, he fell asleep in the car. I thought that once we made it to the campground, he’d think it might be OK after all. That didn’t really turn out to be true until we started setting up our borrowed tent. And when all the bedding was made up inside, he was ready to forsake his own bed at home for a while.
Pitching the Tent
May 7, 1999
To really win him over, we went up the hill onto the dunes. The sand was different from beach sand. It was very fine. It also had some of the feel of fresh snow in that you could be the first to make tracks in wide stretches of the wind-rippled surface. Looking closer you could see that all kinds of critters had really been the first to make tracks. There were tracks straddling a continuous line that told of a lizard or mouse dragging its tail behind. Even beetles left a tiny pattern of footprints in meandering loops across the dunes. We ran around out there until it got dark.
Tatooine – Er, Little Sahara
May 7, 1999
Dinner that night was a collection of snacks not requiring cooking, and then I thought I’d try to put Ethan down to sleep. I had this irrational fantasy that I’d get him to sleep, and then have a little time to socialize with my neighbors before I went to bed myself. I quickly learned that there was no way on earth I was going to leave Ethan in that tent by himself. He was distraught (and out of the tent) when I came back from a bathroom trip. My next thought was to try to read a little in the tent while Ethan went to sleep, which proved to be shattered fantasy number two. In the end, I think I was asleep before Ethan was.
In the morning, I got to introduce him to one of the joys of camping: getting out of a warm sleeping bag and into freezing cold clothes. He had the added exhilaration of getting a diaper change, too.
We climbed the dunes again in search of a patch of sunshine to warm us up, then came back down to camp for pancakes, eggs and sausage, compliments of the ward. After taking down our tent, we spent the rest of the morning on the dunes.
Excavation
May 8, 1999
This trip, we took Ethan’s dump truck and shovel, and he had a great time moving dirt. A lot of people from the ward were playing on a really tall, steep dune. Kids would run and jump from the top to see how far down the hill they could land. Someone even had a plastic sled, and they talked me into taking a ride. That ended with sand-filled clothing after an unspectacular wipe out. All the time we were at the hill, Ethan was squirming his way down it. When he reached the bottom, I figured it was time to move on.
Some people had also brought some model rockets to launch, and Ethan always wanted to chase after the parachutes as they came back down, but he didn’t have much of a chance against the bigger kids.
We packed up and headed out a little before lunch time, and stopped at a McDonald’s on the way back home. It was a nice little trip, and Shannon enjoyed it too. Now that I’ve got two sons, she says she’s looking forward to all three of us going away in a couple of years. I think she meant it in a nice way.
How I celebrated Cathy’s Birthday
It all started Friday afternoon–no I didn’t begin having contractions–I went to the hospital for a non-stress test. Basically I lay on a table for half an hour while machines monitored the baby to determine whether his extended stay in the hotel maternal(original due date June 3) was placing him in any danger. The nurse who performed the tests and saw the baby on ultrasound sent us home saying we’d passed all the tests with flying colors and there would be no induction reprieve for me that day. This was what I expected to hear, so while I was anxious to have the baby, I wasn’t terribly surprised, and it was nice to be reassured that all seemed well.
I’m So Ready
June 3, 1999
Eric and I had only been home for a short time when a man called and asked to speak to me. It turned out to be my doctor, Dr. Johnson — same delivery doctor as Kerry and Melissa. He called to say that upon review of my tests the baby did seem to be under some duress during contractions. Since I was already 40 weeks there was no reason to wait and he felt there was reason to deliver. He said lets have this baby tomorrow. What could I say but OK? After saying goodbye, I announced to Eric and my family “We’re having a baby tomorrow.”
We were instructed to call labor and delivery early Saturday morning to see what time they wanted me to come. Instead, they called us at 5:45 and asked whether we could be there by 6. That left little time to get ready and even less time to become overly nervous. After a light breakfast, a blessing from my husband and father, and kisses for Ethan we went to the hospital. It seemed a little strange to be going to the hospital to have our baby without being in any pain, but I knew there’d be plenty later so I wasn’t too upset.
At the hospital we were taken to a labor room where I climbed on the bed which would be my place for the next several hours. After answering several medical questions, a nurse tried to start my IV. She missed the first time. Watching her made me sick and I thought I might pass out. It was not the best way to start labor.
Nothing like a delicious meal of ice chips to pass the time.
June 5, 1999
The morning progressed uneventfully. We called home to make sure Ethan hadn’t run away or totally exhausted his grandparents, but all was well. I thought it was unfair that they brought a tray of food for Eric to eat in front of me while I dined on ice chips. Around 10 AM, Dr Johnson came by to check my progress and break my water–what fun. Eric kept a fairly detailed log of the labor. In his 11:18 AM entry he wrote “Real pain now.”
About an hour later, still in quite a bit of pain and progressing very slowly, I got a shot of pain killer. I am amazed at how quickly it took effect. I can remember watching the nurse inject the medicine into my IV and wondering how long it would be before I felt some relief. I think it came before she even finished with the injection. I was so dizzy and relaxed I could still feel the pains but they didn’t bother me. I just wanted to doze. At 2 PM I was only dilated to 4 centimeters, I had arrived at the hospital at 2 centimeters, and once again in lots of pain so I asked for an epidural. I should have known better–it was not my day for needles. The IV took two attempts, a simple blood draw required three tries and hurt terribly (I’m still bruised from it) and the epidural was no different. On the first try the doctor punctured my spinal column, so he had to do it again. Because of this, they had to take my blood pressure every 3 minutes to make sure I wasn’t dying, but I was no longer in pain. In fact I was so drugged I wondered if my body was floating.
Half an hour later I started to feel a lot of pressure. Our new nurse (I’d been in labor so long they had a shift change) said it was time to get ready for delivery. She called the doctor and prepared the room and got me to begin pushing. In the course of her preparations we learned she is our neighbor’s mother–small world. She was really nice and very encouraging, almost too much, she had me stop pushing and paged my doctor again because she said if he didn’t hurry in from the parking lot I’d have this baby with out him. Doctor Johnson arrived and after just a little intense pushing our fair-haired boy was born.
Rewards
June 5, 1999
It was really beautiful. With Ethan’s delivery I was so tired and drugged I didn’t know what to expect but Gerrit’s was different. I felt a great desire and the strength needed to deliver him. I thought he was beautiful because I hadn’t had to push very long so his head was round and his eyes were so bright and wide open. We didn’t know what sex baby we were having but I was honestly not at all disappointed that we didn’t have a girl. I was so pleased we’d had another little boy, hopefully a best friend for Ethan. Well, he’s been screaming for the last 20 minutes so I’d better stop now.
New Boy
June 5, 1999
Revolving Companies
I heard once that the average time an employee stays with a computer company is something like two and a half years. That makes technical people seem capricious, but I have a different view of things: I’ve worked full time for four companies in the past seven years, without so much as changing the chair I sit in.
I started out with Folio Corporation a year before I graduated from college. I was so utterly clueless about the way a business works back then that I’m embarrassed. I didn’t know what a stock option was, and I figured that the company must be profitable because they kept paying my salary. Folio was privately owned back then, but in the process of raising funds, they made a deal with Mead (of paper fame) for money in exchange for the right to buy the company after a few years. The owners figured that Folio would be either bankrupt or too big for Mead to buy. They were wrong.
Nearer to the bankrupt side of things, Folio had a very promising new version of its flagship product coming out. In fact, Folio VIEWS went on to win the MVP award in its category from PC Computing Magazine, as well as several other industry awards.
So Mead decided to exercise its option to buy, and Folio became a little fly speck piece of Mead Data Central. We all feared the worst, but little actually changed from a day to day perspective, except that we lost our President, Brad Pelo.
It was in the process of that purchase that I first learned something about options. Apparently I had a few, though they were never discussed with me when I got my job offer. Probably someone wanted to avoid the conversation:
Manager: In addition to your salary, you’ll get mumble mumble options and be a partial owner of the company.
Me: Options? What?
Manager: Uh, well…
Me: Never mind, let’s go back to the part where you’re going to pay me to mess around with computers!
I ended up getting a tiny check every so often. So tiny (not to mention it was taxed at 30%), it was a wonder they even bothered to print the thing up at all.
After a couple of years, the paperless office still had failed to materialize, and Mead audaciously decided that killing trees was going to continue to bring in money, and they could quit wasting time on all that computer junk they had come up with. Mead Data Central became Lexis Nexis, and we found ourselves as another little speck owned by one of the world’s largest publishers, Reed Elsevier.
Reed Elsevier wanted very much for us to change our name to say that we were a division of theirs. We preferred to avoid that, not only because we had successfully avoided such a thing with Mead, but also because Reed Elsevier happened to be a competitor to several of our largest customers. We might as well have put a little tag line on our business cards that said, “Buy Folio software and 10% of your purchase will be used toward putting you out of business!”
It wasn’t a happy relationship, and a couple of years later we convinced them to let us sell ourselves. It was a big secret project to find a buyer, and after months of work, the announcement came that we were being purchased by Open Market, Inc.
All of us who hadn’t been involved in the deal collectively exclaimed, “Who?” Open Market is in the internet commerce business, and it seemed a strange match. I guess their vision of information commerce matched our vision enough that it made sense. Actually, long before any negotiations, someone from each company had made a presentation at a conference right after each other, and people told them they needed to get together because they were saying the same things.
So we became Folio, A Division of Open Market, Inc. This concession on the name turned out to be just a minimization of fear. Each time we had changed hands over the years, our “parents” had wanted us to feel like there weren’t going to be sweeping changes; that we could feel secure in our jobs. As soon as we started to feel a part of Open Market, the name Folio was used exclusively for a product line instead of a company. We were all Open Market. I’ve even got Open Market business cards. For the first time, the Folio sign on the building was replaced with another company name.
This was a very educational time. We were a public company (OMKT on NASDAQ), and what we did actually had an impact on stock prices. We all got options in the company, and you could track their value. We felt like an internet company, and started making personal purchases online.
But things still didn’t always feel right. Press releases said that Open Market is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. and listed specific offices all over the world, but never in Provo, Utah. The company also gave some of Folio’s biggest customers a royalty discount if they would prepay in order to get more revenue for a weak commerce quarter. And when the company didn’t meet analysts expectations for a quarter, the president listed poor Folio sales to the corporate market as one of the causes. Never mind that we had intentionally shifted focus from that market segment, and the correct response from that statement would have been, “No duh!” it still sounded like we weren’t doing our part. And last, but not least, in an industry where stock prices were soaring, we were stagnant.
So a couple of weeks ago, the wild rumors started flying around the office: we were being sold off, that we were being bought by a group of local private investors including Alan Ashton (of WordPerfect fame), and that Brad Pelo was coming back.
Amazingly, all the rumors were confirmed last Wednesday. Except that the deal is more complicated. This new company, ABSB, L.C. (after the investors’ initials I guess), is leasing the Folio product line from Open Market (with the option to buy in a few years), and hiring all of us as its own employees. The lease arrangement, as opposed to an outright sale, was purported to be for tax advantages, but it left an odd side-effect. Open Market still owns the Folio name, and won’t give it up to the leasing company to use as its own name. Hence the hastily named ABSB where the investors had really wanted Folio.com. So now we begin our new employment trying to think up a more inspired name.
I guess the move made the analysts happy — four of them upgraded the stock to ‘buy’ after the announcement. Hopefully the stock will shoot up before I run out of time to cash in my options.
So now I’m one of the old-timers in spite of a nascent company. I guess I’ll have to stick around for a while more, because figuring out what to put on my resume would be too hard. Besides, if I don’t like working for this company, I’m sure it will be something else in a couple of years anyway.
Copyright � Eric Smith, 1989-1999, All rights reserved.