Ten years since the height of the dotcom bubble. Wow. Remember that? Suddenly, you were a loser for having a proper job.  You know, a job where you did real work and sold real stuff to real people. Every geek and their granny had some amazing ruse for becoming an internet squillionaire. But they couldn’t risk telling you what in case you nicked it. But then they did anyway, and nine times out of ten it was something so spectacularly lame you vowed to shoot Tim Berners-Lee himself if it would prevent said ruse getting off the ground.

I scoff now, but ten years ago I left a good ‘proper’ job to go and work at a dotcom startup. They threw more money at me than I’d ever hoped of earning before and I did absolutely nothing for the entire period I was there, except tinker with the background colour of my powerless PowerPoint presentation and drink the office fridge dry of Minute Maid. There wasn’t anything else to do. Because, at the head of my list of memories of the dotcom bubble is:

1. No one could really understand what it was they were doing. Let alone convey that to others. So mostly they did nothing. Also….
2. Everyone was about 19. It was like Bugsy Malone with laptops.
3. Everyone was a vice-president or director. Even the guy who delivered the Minute Maid.
4. The offices looked like those fake ones in ‘The Real Hustle’ – cheap, quick-to-assemble, no distinguishing features, full of con artists.
5. Roughly three new members of staff would start each morning. Subsequently the hours between 9 and 12 would be spent unpacking swivel chairs and disposing of the cardboard. Then it was lunchtime. Yay!
6. All the boys fancied Martha Lane-Fox.
7. No iPods, Spotify or lastfm in them days – so you had to listen to your colleagues CDs through the tiny speakers of their ‘puters. As they were all geeks this was inevitably ‘Come On Over’ by Shania Twain or, if they were really edgy, Macy Gray ‘On How Life Is’.

I tried to say goodbye and I choked. Tried to walk away but I crumbled. How could I turn my back on the glorious internet goldrush? Loser! But somehow in the end I managed it. Six months after joining I ran away. Proper jobs had never seemed so attractive. And the dotcom? Ten years on it still lingers in the search engines like a ghost in the machine but every page is dead. I hope they kept the receipts for those swivel chairs.

Chic Geek – Guest Blogger