And she hung up.
I made spaghetti for dinner because there was never an argument about spaghetti. By eight o'clock, the two little ones were asleep, and Nicole was finishing her homework. She was twelve, and had to be in bed by ten o'clock, though she didn't like any of her friends to know that.
The littlest one, Amanda, was just nine months. She was starting to crawl everywhere, and to stand up holding on to things. Eric was eight; he was a soccer kid, and liked to play all the time, when he wasn't dressing up as a knight and chasing his older sister around the house with his plastic sword.
Nicole was in a modest phase of her life; Eric liked nothing better than to grab her bra and go running around the house, shouting, "Nicky wears a bra-a! Nicky wears a bra-a!" while Nicole, too dignified to pursue him, gritted her teeth and yelled, "Dad? He's doing it again! Dad!" And I would have to go chase Eric and tell him not to touch his sister's things. This was what my life had become. At first, after I lost the job at MediaTronics, it was interesting to deal with sibling rivalry. And often, it seemed, not that different from what my job had been.
At MediaTronics I had run a program division, riding herd over a group of talented young computer programmers. At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job. So I managed the team, and it was a full-time job; like most Silicon Valley programmers, my team seemed to live in a perpetual crisis of crashed Porsches, infidelities, bad love affairs, parental hassles, and drug reactions, all superimposed on a forced-march work schedule with all-night marathons fueled by cases of Diet Coke and Sun chips.
But the work was exciting, in a cutting-edge field. We wrote what are called distributed parallel processing or agent-based programs. These programs model biological processes by creating virtual agents inside the computer and then letting the agents interact to solve real-world problems. It sounds strange, but it works fine. For example, one of our programs imitated ant foraging-how ants find the shortest path to food-to route traffic through a big telephone network. Other programs mimicked the behavior of termites, swarming bees, and stalking lions. It was fun, and I would probably still be there if I hadn't taken on some additional responsibilities. In my last few months there, I'd been put in charge of security, replacing an outside tech consultant who'd had the job for two years but had failed to detect the theft of company source code, until it turned up in a program being marketed out of Taiwan. Actually, it was my division's source code-software for distributed processing. That was the code that had been stolen.
We knew it was the same code, because the Easter eggs hadn't been touched. Programmers always insert Easter eggs into their code, little nuggets that don't serve any useful purpose and are just put there for fun. The Taiwanese company hadn't changed any of them; they used our code wholesale. So the keystrokes Alt-Shift-M-9 would open up a window giving the date of one of our programmers' marriage. Clear theft.
Of course we sued, but Don Gross, the head of the company, wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. So he put me in charge of security, and I was angry enough about the theft to take the job. It was only part-time; I still ran the division. The first thing I did as security officer was to monitor workstation use. It was pretty straightforward; these days, eighty percent of companies monitor what their workers do at terminals. They do it by video, or they do it by recording keystrokes, or by scanning email for certain keywords ... all sorts of procedures out there.
Don Gross was a tough guy, an ex-Marine who had never lost his military manner. When I told him about the new system, he said, "But you're not monitoring my terminal, right?" Of course not, I said. In fact, I'd set up the programs to monitor every computer in the company, his included. And that was how I discovered, two weeks later, that Don was having an affair with a girl in accounting, and had authorized her to have a company car. I went to him and said that based on emails relating to Jean in accounting, it appeared that someone unknown was having an affair with her, and that she might be getting perks she wasn't entitled to. I said I didn't know who the person was, but if they kept using email, I'd soon find out. I figured Don would take the hint, and he did. But now he just sent incriminating email from his home, never realizing that everything went through the company server and I was getting it all. That's how I learned he was "discounting" software to foreign distributors, and taking large "consultant fees" into an account in the Cayman Islands. This was clearly illegal, and I couldn't overlook it. I consulted my attorney, Gary Marder, who advised me to quit.
"Quit?" I said.
"Yeah. Of course."
"Why?"
"Who cares why? You got a better offer elsewhere. You've got some health problems. Or some family issues. Trouble at home. Just get out of there. Quit."
"Wait a minute," I said. "You think I should quit because he's breaking the law? Is that your advice to me?"
"No," Gary said. "As your attorney, my advice is that if you are aware of any illegal activity you have a duty to report it. But as your friend, my advice is to keep your mouth shut and get out of there fast."
"Seems kind of cowardly. I think I have to notify the investors." Gary sighed. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Jack," he said, "the investors can look out for themselves. You get the fuck out of there."
I didn't think that was right. I had been annoyed when my code had been stolen. Now I found myself wondering if it actually had been stolen. Maybe it had been sold. We were a privately held company, and I told one of the board members.