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internationalist fantasies
Monday, March 19 2001
The day was so beautiful I could smell it and Jesus was it ever intoxicating, like a more sincere form of ecstasy. I could have sat there on that park bench at 25th and Wilshire all day, watching the ducks, the playful German Shepherd puppy, the wholesome-looking woman by herself reading.
But my lunch of Jumbo Jacks was over and I had a job to do. I made excellent progress throughout the afternoon and by the end of the day, when the UK CTO invited me out for margaritas, there was no sense in refusing.
She drove me in her big SUV down to her apartment on the edge of Marina Del Rey, and we walked from there to a second floor bar near the beach on Washington Blvd. It was a place where the margaritas are dispensed from a tap, a fact that seemed to delight the CTO.
Actually, everything seemed to delight the CTO. She was in perhaps the best mood in which I've ever seen her. This afternoon she'd had a meeting with the second in command of the parent company and he'd unexpectedly said some extremely positive things about the UK site, even saying that it might be a good template for other international versions of the mother site. It definitely has some advantages over the parent site, most of them based around the fact that it was designed and didn't evolve. It's more like a Macintosh than a Windows 98 box. (To seriously mix some analogies here: you don't see the phylogeny recapitulated in ontogeny with the DOS screens of its ancestors.)
For most of the evening, the CTO was spinning elaborate fantasies of forming an elite SWAT team (comprised of herself, me, and Simon her young genius producer/developer, now in the UK). In her fantasy world, we'd sit around at the headquarters drinking margaritas most of the time, but whenever word came of a newly-independent European or Asian republic, we'd load up into an airplane with our laptops and parachutes and then be dropped into the capital, where we'd rapidly set up new a localized version of the site and then we'd get out by any means necessary.
The CTO was in the mood for curry, but when we found the Main Street Indian restaurant she fancies closed, we hit the Canal Club instead. That third margarita I had at the Canal Club didn't affect my bike ride home, though it really did a number on my head the next day.
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