This New Internet Thing, Chapter 33

The End

Chapter 32 (notes) was the climax of Len’s, Cassie’s, and Janet’s journeys. Len now has a job running an Internet sector mutual fund, not something he knew he wanted to do at the start, but now he does. Cassie didn’t know she wanted to be a single mom, but now she is, and Len’s the godfather. Janet didn’t know she didn’t want to keep climbing up the management ladder, but now she’s off it. and happier than ever (as well as richer).

In classical music, a coda is the wrapup of a piece of music. This reference says:

Codas are always found at the end of a section or whole piece of music, and they bring a sense of closure and a way to wrap up all the musical melodies and themes that have been played in the music up to that point.

So here’s the coda to This New Internet Thing. I hope you enjoyed it. Now go to Amazon and buy the book.

============================ Coda ========================

 Len went back to his rental house in Sunnyvale and changed out of his suit. Gretchen and Mickey were ecstatic to see him. He sat down to watch some football, Mickey jumping up to join him and Gretchen climbing up the ramp he’d bought for her, since she had trouble moving these days.

“A godfather. My life is complete now.” he thought. “I guess I have to go to church more often.”

All those years of working at Chrysler, keeping up with Janet’s career, and not thinking about retirement very much at all, and here he was, 2000 miles away and living in Silicon Valley. Life sure throws you some curves.

Now his days were spent on the phone, meeting with bankers, tech executives, reporters, staff, and people from the parent fund company back East. Either that, or hunched over his Bloomberg terminal. He’d thought he was going to be playing golf and fishing when he retired, not running hundreds of millions of dollars.

The dogs were his best assistants. Almost everyone he met loved them, and he knew he could always regale them with the story of how Gretchen had taken down Harry Redding and clamped down on his sleeve like she’d been taught in K-9 Academy. He could tell she knew when he was talking about her.

Investing seemed so easy, too! A monkey throwing darts could probably pick stocks as well as he did — everything went up. Investors were throwing money at him. His bosses back in New York were kind of coy about what his bonus might be this year, but he had the distinct impression he was finally going to be able to buy a house here.

It was funny. A couple years ago, he would have thought that getting rich would be good because he could pass it all on to Janet when he died. Not that he ever entertained the thought of getting rich! After all, he was retired, so how would that even happen?

Now she didn’t even need it! She’d gotten rich on her own. His ex-wife, thankfully, wouldn’t get a cent of his money, since he’d made it all after the divorce.

There was a dark cloud over it all, though, and Janet and her friends had been telling him about it for years: Microsoft. The big bully in Redmond was intent on crushing Netscape, and they had the means to do it, too. Everyone he talked to about Netscape always led off with that topic: “Isn’t Internet Explorer going to crush them?”

They were pulling out all the stops to do it. Apparently Bully Boy Gates was terrified that the browser would be the new operating system, and his stupid Windows would be nothing but “a set of buggy device drivers,” as the Netscape kids liked to say. 

As a fund manager, almost everyone in the Valley wanted to talk to him. Lately, he was picking up vibes that Microsoft was going beyond normal business competition, and starting to lean on everyone to not do business with Netscape. The Valley being a small place, Matt had told him that his ex-wife Miriam’s new husband was one of Bill’s Bully Boys, going around and threatening everyone in the computer business.

Len wasn’t a lawyer, but from what he remembered about GM and Chrysler and the Feds, there are some things that you just can’t do, according to the antitrust laws. Computer makers were being prohibited from including Netscape on their computers, for instance.

He would ask his lawyer friends about this, and they all told him that antitrust suits had gone out of style since the Republicans got into power, in 1980. The Feds had done the AT&T divestiture, and they’d settled with IBM (which, ironically, gave Microsoft the breathing room to become a monopoly themselves). There didn’t seem to be much hope that even a Democratic administration would pursue Microsoft.

Still, he did hint to Janet’s friends today that there were things going on, and indeed there were. Maybe, maybe Netscape’s lawyers would get the ear of some of the lawyers in D.C. There was a white paper that he’d gotten hold of where they laid out the case for going after Microsoft. Would anyone in the Department of Justice pay any attention to it? And given how slowly the legal system moved, would anything happen before Janet’s company got its oxygen cut off, as the Redmond bullies liked to say?

He always told her to sell her stock as soon as it vested. “You never know what’s going to happen, so get the cash!” he said. He felt the same way about whatever money he made off this Internet thing: take the chips off the table, before the dealer takes them all back.

Now he had a goddaughter! He thought of little Janine in her white dress, shaking hands with all the grownups. My God, she was adorable. Did Cassie want him in their lives? Her real father never came up here with Elaine, and Cassie didn’t talk about him much. He got the impression that her parents didn’t get along too well, but he didn’t want to pry.

Maybe she’d want him to babysit for Janine! Wow, that would be an adventure. At least she was toilet-trained, probably. He’d have to get used to answering a million “why?” questions again like he did for Janet when she was little.

The fund company was getting concerned about his age: did he have a “succession plan?” “Yeah, I’ll retire or die, and then someone else will take over!ˆ” he always said. But they were insistent. Especially, they wanted him to have an up-to-date will. Was Janet going to end up as the manager of the fund if he died? They liked her but didn’t think she was really up to that job, and she didn’t, either. He had an appointment with an estate lawyer next week.

What about his personal assets? The default would be that Janet got everything, which would be fine if she actually needed it. But now he had an inspiration: “I can direct some of it to Janine’s college fund! That’s something a godfather can do.”

That felt good. He fell asleep watching the rest of the game. He didn’t even need to tell Cassie this college fund existed, unless he wanted to establish it now.

He always read in bed, before turning out the light. Mickey took up most of the bed, but fortunately he always jumped off and went to his dog bed eventually. Then one of them would always come in and wake him up when they needed to go outside

Later that night when he was taking Gretchen out he had a sudden thought. He wasn’t even sure where it came from, since he hadn’t been dreaming about his brother Jack:

I could endow a permanent memorial to Jack Saunders at the Merchant Marine Memorial in Washington.

It’ll say, 

“He gave his life so that other sailors might live.”

As he went back to sleep, Len thought, “I always wanted to catch bad guys. But this is pretty good, too.”