Nine years ago, just about to the day, I left my job at the San Francisco Examiner -- where I'd worked for, oh, nine years and a few months -- to join the handful of people who at that time constituted Salon. We've been through
a lot of different offices in our existence, starting out with rented space in a downtown architecture firm on Main St.; then to our first real digs in China Basin Landing, down the hall from Howard Rheingold's Electric Communities and the old Well Engaged, but otherwise isolated from civilization by the vast tracts of empty space below Townsend Street that have since been crammed with development; then to the corner of Third and Mission, just upstairs from Rochester Big & Tall, a perfect perch from which to watch the dot-com bubble begin to inflate; then, aloft on that bubble ourselves, over to the top two stories of a fancier building on Fourth Street off Mission; then consolidating on one of those floors; then moving downstairs to our comfortable, slightly smaller digs in the same building.
During the bubble's boom years we'd see, through the lenses of retracting elevator doors, the hustle of VC-inflated commerce on floor after floor of expensive office space. Then, from late 2000 on, we observed the gradual depopulation of those same floors, as one failed dot-com after another dismantled its cubicles and closed up shop.
In my current office, every time I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling I'm faced with a grim reminder of that era, a memento dot-com mori in black Smartie ink scrawled on an oh-so-fashionably exposed duct with the name of the company that preceded us in the space:
I don't know why it was important that these ducts be so labeled. It's certainly not worth the effort to efface the writing. It's just one of those little bits of office archaeology serving to remind you that we're all just passing through. Still, I'm sort of grateful for it. As I read intimations of a new wave of speculative excitement in the industry, I lean back in my chair, let my eyes float up ductward, and vow, never again!
Bonus link: While we're musing about the Internet Bubble, Paul Graham (of "Hackers and Painters") has written a thoughtful essay on "What the Bubble Got Right."
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