History - Interlude
Telling my life story isn’t take up as much time or space as I thought it would. Therefore, before I introduce Mistress Natalie, I want to rewind a little bit and describe my life at the time.
After my Civil Service contract ran out, I started working for a small web development start-up. This was the renaissance period of the web - new technology was emerging on a weekly basis, Microsoft had just decided that it should really look into this "Internet" thing, and there was a "get rich quick" vibe akin to the California gold rush.
Shortly after the company got rolling, things looked bleak. We had some high-profile clients, but the money was running out. The president of the company (one of the 5 of us) decided to take on a new management team, a couple of MBAs who had no vision, no concept of technology, and were two of the biggest sleazebags around. I didn’t know all this then - I thought we were saved and that riches beyond my wildest dreams were just around the corner.
I invested my entire heart and soul into that little company. We started creating some amazing innovations at the time. We developed searchable websites, built a method of teaching classes over the Internet for a local junior college, created a framework to allow us to rapidly develop database-driven content sites, and so on. It was a pretty exciting time. We even developed a way for people to pick items in a store and pay for everything at once. (While I am saying that we invented the shopping cart, I’m not saying we were the first. You just had to create everything from scratch back then. Still I should be a freakin’ billionaire now. *sigh* )
It wasn’t , however, a pretty lucrative time. In order to pay us less, the company rented a corporate apartment for a few of us to live in. When we couldn’t afford even that, we all moved into our offices. ("The riches are just around the corner - trust us!")
It was right around then that I finally met the woman who would show me the light - Mistress Natalie.
To be continued…
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