A gorgeous spring day. I drove like a maniac on narrow, winding country roads to Cazadero for the big meet with Doug Greene, Jim St. Louis, Josh Scholar, and Mike Larner.
I showed them POP and we went for a walk around Doug’s property, had a beer and smoked a joint (probably grown by one of his neighbors), broke out the yellow pads and discussed the technical challenges of the MS-DOS conversion while Doug’s wife cooked dinner.
After dinner Doug said he’d been chewing all day on the idea of subcontracting to the other guys and he just didn’t think he could do it. “See, if I took this on, I’d be putting my name on the line. I’ve done lots of conversions for Broderbund and I haven’t messed up once. And that’s an important thing to me. Now I’ve got this business thing taking up 80-90% of my time, and I just don’t know if I could handle the pressure of taking on a project this size.”
I said that in that case, I’d have to reconsider. There was a silence. “Whew! Doug said. “I didn’t realize it had come down to that.”
Doug drove the others down to their car (parked, like mine, at the stream that blocked Doug’s driveway and which only Doug’s Volkswagen bus could cross) while I stayed behind. After Doug came back, he and his wife and I sat and talked some more. He’s confident in Jim, but admitted he has his doubts about Josh and Mike.
We chatted for an hour about peripherally related topics. Broderbund, corporate America, the rat race, capitalism, freedom. I was seducing him. At the critical psychological moment, I remarked:
“You know, all my clipping is done on the byte boundaries.”
There was a pause.
“Well, that was a nice thing to say!” Doug exclaimed. He started stroking his beard and asking more questions. “Huh. This is starting to sound not so bad.” In the end he said he’d sleep on it.
Blog
What a coincidence – I used the same line when I met my wife!
(no, not *really*…)