Love Apologizes to Virgin

About the author: Marlowe is the moniker of Tim Lieder - a 31-year old who's never held down a job for more than a couple of years in his life. He originally intended marlowe as his ebay user name, but that was taken so he contented himself with Marlowe1. He had just read Dr. Faustus, although you could say that it's also a tribute to Philip Marlowe. Tim Lieder is neither a fictional detective or a gay Elizabethan. He has never sorted out the dealings of a creepy complicated family with a notoriously dead limo driver. Nor has anyone stuck a knife in his eye and claimed that he was Shakespeare. Currently he works in a bank but he's planning on going to grad school. About his bi-weekly column This column is what happens when you allow children without fathers watch gory horror movies and drink cola products for breakfast. View all articles by Marlowe, 2HC Columnist...

Belief is a strange thing. When I was 14, I rejected the belief that Jesus was the ONLY way to eternal salvation. Yet throughout my Transcendentalist and Pagan phases I was certain that I would find a version of Christianity to my liking. Several dedicated left wing Communists remained Stalinists long after the first atrocities Communist USSR came to the forefront.

My beliefs shifted much faster with Quikpages. Quikpages did less nice things for orphans and widows. "We want someone to buy us," didn't have the same Romanticism as "we want to save the world when everyone believes in us." A year after I joined Quikpages I finally admitted that it wasn't worth the grief. I also realized that it wasn't helping the world in any way, shape or form. Still took me another 5 months to outright quit the damn place.

I endured the shifting bonus plan, the constant phone time, the lack of design time. I was even surviving a perpetually crashing Template program. It was the Third All Employee Meeting that poked me out of disgruntled complacency. John Denis - the owner -- didn't even have the decency to vary his future wealth and stock options speech.

Other coworkers had already fled to real Web design jobs. Techies-Dot-Com was a popular choice; an employment agency for technical work, it was growing exponentially. They paid salary (30K starting wage), trained employees on useful skills such as Javascript and actually respected the workers. They didn't hire bullying and ignorant managers. At Techies.com the designers actually designed Web sites. Meanwhile Quikpages promised that elusive $10,000 lottery ticket.

After the fourth duplicate stock options speech, I stopped waiting for stock options and began waiting for dissolution and Unemployment checks. Fortunately Jon of the Bad Teeth had joined. He was a 45-year old Jazz musician talking like Shane McGowan with money-making schemes such as the pornographic literature site. No pictures, just words - every cliché from Penthouse letters strung together in awkward prose. He wanted to feature vacationing middle age women in his stories; so he could sell advertising to travel bureaus. Yes, seriously. Despite these schemes and the stench of failure, we all liked him. He annoyed the managers in ways we couldn't imagine.

Not content to mere disgruntlement and grumbling, Jon truly believed that he could make a difference. Every meeting went long with his questions. Every time he spoke the managers looked like they were digesting rats. His questions weren't hard, but they hurt the managers. Either they didn't know the answers or they couldn't say the answers as the answers betrayed the obvious truth - Quikpages didn't know what it was doing. He didn't accept their answers either. He grilled them for every ounce of pain he could get. Whether they were training us to "manage customer expectations" or telling us about the new dental plan, Jon was pestering away. They couldn't even write him up because he wasn't being rude with the questions - just persistent. I remember the Customer Service session where the trainer admonished us to emulate the royal treatment common in stores like Nordstrom's. Of course Jon was the first person to point out that we couldn't afford Nordstrom's. That ended the training part of the training seminar. On the last day of mandatory overtime he admitted that he hadn't worked a minute of overtime with an "oh well, I'll make it up to them."

I could talk about every single thing that led me to quit the place, citing how long I accepted it as normal before realizing that I was being had. I could tell you more about the managers and the new Template that sucked all creativity out of the design part. I could tell you about including the phrase "do you ever feel like running away from your job or killing your coworkers" but I think I'll skip ahead to the point where I knew that I would leave - the unscheduled All (minus ten) Employee Meeting.

The CFO started speaking. She was tense. She reassured us that WE weren't in trouble. Ten employees would no longer be coworkers. Pillsbury wouldn't allow them to get away with their behavior and neither should Quikpages. She assured us that we were still a young fun company; the misbehavior of a few people shouldn't ruin that. We all looked around trying to figure out who wasn't there. Then John Denis - the no neck owner - took over. He called us the A Team. They only let the losers go. The sports analogies kept flying. We were draft choices. The fired employees didn't want to give 110%. An hour passed and yet no one mentioned the reason.

Ten minutes into the speech, a coworker asked how they might prevent something like this in the future. He started out slowly. Snort. I don't know. Deep breath. I don't know how - snort snort - we could keep those kind of people out of our company. Breath. We hired them thinking that they would work out. We'd have to revamp the entire hiring process - snort - and still we wouldn't be able to prevent those kind of employees. You were the employees that read "Come to work. Work hard. Make money. Have fun." You're the employees that are going to become rich when the company gets bought because you are the good employees. You're the employees that are going to become rich when the company gets bought because you are the good employees. The employees we let go - pause - read "come to Quikpages, use us, play around, act like lazy assholes, fuck around…"

After he finished swearing he gave us the afternoon off. When we came back we realized that they fired the hardest workers. These people actually volunteered for overtime and knew design principles. They created a management mocking Web site. Granted, comparing the CFO to the Wicked Witch of the West might not have been a great idea but dismissal? The bit about Hitler recommending Quikpages was juvenile, but not off-base. If Hitler wanted a Web site, Quikpages wouldn't hesitate to give him one - especially if he wanted to prepay with a credit card. Soon afterwards they created a new HR position with one of the job duties being to "represent Quikpages in Unemployment hearings."

Thus I began taking smoke breaks. At least 5 times a day I was out on the balcony looking at the skyline, talking with coworkers. No I don't smoke. I actually learned things. I knew that the Escort Service site I created wasn't going to make it to inception. I learned about the Telemarketing Representative driving up 100 miles to make the Tech Department fix his laptop. He had punched the monitor. I learned Bad Teeth Jon's philosophy on management. Every time the manager told me to get on the phones I would run out and take a smoke break. After spending 20 minutes arguing with Charlie the drip and Rhonda the psychotic elephant about a bonus that should have been $140 but disappeared due to another shift in the bonus plan, I stopped caring about phone time altogether. Charlie could tell me to get on the phone all he wanted but I was impervious. I wasn't going to leave a long bridge-burning email like Blake I wasn't going to be the coworker that had such a fit the police escorted him from the building.

I began looking in earnest. Recruiters called me at work. I sent my resume out to every place I could find. I even left a "telemarketers are friends" meeting to go to an interview. I remember the CFO's glare from my departure. That made it worthwhile. Techies.Com was no longer hiring, but the freelancing companies were eager for new talent. I knew how to work fast. I knew HTML. In 1999, that was more than adequate. I signed up with two freelancing places and without a job I quit. I gave a week's notice and that week was pure detached fascination. Rhonda still yelled at me for leaving my phone on but it didn't matter. They even tried writing me up again. On August 1, 1999 I took my last phone call - a weapons manufacturer. I asked him how his grenade launchers were better than the grenade launchers you could buy at K Mart. I ignored my coworkers laughing in the background. I went home and enjoyed my retirement.

I still run into former coworkers. Mentioning Quikpages is a horrible crime. A few months ago I was going to a job interview out in Bloomington. I was lost and I had to walk most of the way. At one point I passed the abandoned Techies.com building. It was a strange moment. Quikpages taught its employees one important lesson - the Web design boom was going to die. I didn't know when. I didn't know how, but I knew that I wanted to make as much money as I could before it all went down.

It was a strange time being a disgruntled Web designer. Most of us felt just a little guilty for complaining about the long hours, the lack of respect and the instability of the market. Industry standard was $20/hour. Sure, Netslaves helped remind us that most of the Web work truly sucked, but with everyone reacting like we were cool when we said we were Web designers, it felt like a sham all around.

In August 1999, I had two freelance agencies trying to find work for me. I was free from Quikpages. As soon as I found a job I was going to make industry standard or higher. It was the best economy in years. I was so fucked.

In college Tim Lieder (marlowe) smoked pot. Now he drinks Scotch. He blames Frank Sinatra.