i am the wolf blitzer of the bay area

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, July 3, 2001 5:59pm

Day Six of Project: Noogie Trip, and all is going well.

I may have seen more Rice alumni today than since I was last on campus. Troy, Josh, Angie, Amar, and, of course, Julia. You'd almost think educated folks ran in the same circles. Or something.

I saw the bulk of those kids at their place of employment, Sapient. (here is a picture of Amar on a Sapient webpage, for those of you who doubt)

It was weird hanging out in their workplace because Sapient had just fired 390 people, none of them people I knew. Good luck, I guess.

Still, for someone who lived a fair distance from the whole Internet "bubble burst" epicenter, it was odd to see the "new economy" in its death throes, firsthand. There were rooms with tons of really nice, ergonomic chairs, with no one in them. Rooms with tons of really nice phones piled up on tables. All manner of dot-com detritus waiting to be carted off to some museum of human stupidity or something.

It was weird.

Or maybe it was just another San Francisco office building. What do I know? I'm unemployed.

Nonetheless, the atmosphere was less than busy, so Amar, Angie, and I played Scrabble in a conference room. That seems significant or poetic or something. Although, in hindsight, it would have been much more so had we played "Ring around the Rosie".

Amar and I ate lunch at the farmer's market near his office. We went around eating fruit samples for several minutes until we'd had our fill of sweets and bought ourselves tamales. It seemed so Bohemian, eating like that, but we weren't doing anything illegal. I guess I'll have to think of an edgier way for the kids to eat in the treatment I'm writing for Rent II - Gen Y!. It's hard to feel edgy when you're unemployed with a severance package.