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Ahh, let me tell you about the Google drug dealer. It is riveting! See thread...
So. I once worked on a sysops team at NBCi/Xoom.com and this is back when you racked your own servers and pre-cloud days.
My boyfriend at the time and I broke things off and I needed a roommate to take over his rent/room. I posted the room on Craigslist and much to my surprise a coworker applied.
In my stupidity, I thought someone I worked with was somehow more trustworthy than someone random. So, I asked him to move in.
Let’s just call this guy Jack.
So, my place was right next to a school. I told Jack when he moved in that there can’t be any illegal drugs or drug usage in the house, esp given the proximity to the public school.
Jack says “oh, I don’t use drugs.. no problem.” I also remind Jack we have a downstairs neighbor, so no parties unless we coordinate it with them and quiet after 10pm. Also.. no problem he tells me.
About one week after he moves in, I have to work really late. Our company got us cabs home if we worked past nightfall, so I took advantage of this perk and as I pulled up to my house, I see about 20 or so people on our stairs...
There’s a raging party going on. Neighbors are definitely freaking out. I clear out the house. Jack apologizes - says it won’t happen again.
So Jack is also on the Sysops team and as such has to go on call, like the rest of us. One day he walks into my room and says, “how do I get my laptop online?” I ask for clarification, because clearly he MUST know how these things work...
No no no. He doesn’t. He has no idea how to get online. He has no idea what an Ethernet cable, nor an IP address or a DNS server is. I’m dumbfounded. How. How?!?
I walk him through it and he says, “never mind. I have a dj gig I need to go do, can I use your computer?” I back up to see what he’s about to do. He logs into the paging system and pauses or rolls over his alerts to the secondary and tertiaries and proudly says, “fixed it!”
One night I wake up and find several people waiting in the hallway and Jack’s door is closed. I ask them what they are waiting for and they are cagey. I open Jack’s door and he’s doing lines and selling drugs from his room in our house.
I’m all about legalization and I personally don’t give a shit that he did drugs, but we had a deal. He agreed to it. So, I asked him to move out immediately.
This is like 2000/2001. I see him at work and I just do my best to avoid him. Slowly, I figure out he knows absolutely nothing about anything he was hired to do. He’s a drug dealer.
The last time I saw Jack, he went around to all of our desks and said he was leaving to work elsewhere. He had just landed a job at Google working on their server group.
Google. Let that sink in.
The place that is notorious for not hiring people for failing trivia questions on their phone screens. Hires Jack. Hires him to do something I know for a fact he had no idea how to do anything with.
So I ask some friends about him years later and they told me he became really wealthy from his Google shares and he became their employee drug dealer.
There are stories of misses and then there’s complete fucknuts that are dumber than rocks like Jack.
It took me a long time to find inner peace about Jack. I applied for a job at Google. It is the only job in my life I wanted and didn’t get because of my educational background. All I could think about was how he was getting people high and pretending to rack servers.
