The BK Chronicles
“The tricky thing about telling this story is figuring out where to start. I guess I should probably start off with who I was, Sid Patel, a software developer for Nile. The company caused a massive stir in Seattle by deciding to build a campus right in the center of the city. The additional hundred thousand employees turned the traffic in the area from nominal to ridiculous. Nile employees were hated and most lied about where they worked.
It's hard to imagine that Nile started as an online dildo trading company. The 'i' in the company logo was still a sex object. No one understood buying things online at the end of the 20th century, especially not used sex toys.
The bartering mechanics turned out to be revolutionary, and after first only adding soiled panties and butt plugs, they started allowing any item to be traded. The 'Traders' would post pictures of the items they were trading, and they added any item they liked into their wishlist. The system would then create a spider web-like architecture to figure a way to get the items through multiple trade routes. If Stephanie was trading her limited edition Big Black Cock with the spinning Clit Tickler, and wanted a UW Pocket Pool Cue Stick from Rebeckah, we might have to initially trade the Cue Stick to Ron for his Fart Catcher, and trade the Fart Catcher for a Rusty Tromboner from someone whose name is represented by a couple of Chinese characters, because that item was in Rebeckah's wishlist. Ron would get his chance to satisfy his wife's BBC craving before their relationship collapsed.
Nile took care of the shipping labels and received their cut through the handling costs. Since it was a bartering system, that handling fee was the only money exchanged. This was a terrible business plan and the Nile was about to end before it ever began, but a fluke saved the day.
The CEO and founder of Nile, Sned Piercely, was a short, balding man with hairy knuckles. The only reason why I say hairy knuckles is because they are very hairy, like braidable hairy. There was a PicsandWords page that claimed to be his knuckles, and someone had taken the time to PhotoEffect pictures of his knuckles, on the beach or smoking a joint.
The handling surcharge business plan was the brainchild of Sned's, along with everything else Nile was about. He made decisions not based on reports or advisors, but on gut feelings and emotions. When he saw servers were on sale for 20% off, he put all of the business’ capital towards them. The exact amount of servers he purchased is unknown, but early reports describe it as, 'enough to store a quarter of the entire internet.'
When asked by the members of the board why he placed all of their finances in a bunch of these servers, he is quoted as saying, 'We pay most of our people a hundred thousand or more a year. This is a one-time payment at a fraction of the cost.' It turns out, although he was running one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Sned had no idea what a server was. The 20% off sale described the servers as, 'great at sharing data or resources among multiple clients', so he was sure that they were the indentured workforce he had always dreamt of.
According to Sam Shephard, author of the book, "Sned's a Moron! Getting away from Nile before the Flood Begins," Sned vanished after realizing the mistake he made. He just left the crisis he had put them in. Most of the higher ups left, like Sheppard, easily finding jobs at PicsandWords or Edison. But some of them stayed, one being Simon Oliver.
Simon sat down and thought about what he could do with all of this storage the servers provided. He came up with a plan that changed the company in its entirety. They became the first cloud space and offered a network of services to go with the cloud that ultimately became the Nile Advanced Digital Systems or NADS. Pronounced NADS, which to some was another word for ballsack. That was the system I worked on.
I started by trying to tell you about myself and I ended up going on and on about this stupid company. That's what it does to you. They lay down your insignificance on day one. Their Zero Exclusive Recognition Order, or ZERO, was supposedly aimed at solidifying the team. This policy didn't include Sned who was the center of another policy, called POS, or Praise-On-Site. It seemed like a Jack Mitchell concert, whenever he was in the office. Women would faint and everyone would try to touch him. It was ridiculous. I say that now, but if you saw the last time he was in my office, you would have seen me pushing past Xiao, a 90 pound fellow programmer, to extend my index finger just enough to scrape his collar. I'm not proud of it! The POS is actually a part of our monthly review! That's right, with a business of over 10,000 employees, he makes sure he is in each of their presence at least once a month, to be groveled over.
Do you remember the name of that guy who figured out NADS? Nope. Unless you went back and read it. I barely know that guy's name because he is also subject to the ZERO.
Sned didn't mention Simon and took complete credit for the move with his clap back at Sam Sheppard. He originally planned on writing a novel about the events and how they transpired, but after some time of working on it, unveiled a children's book called "It's Ok to crie.” But cry was spelled, c-r-i-e. The book consisted of subpar pictures of a boy that looked like it could be an attempt at drawing Sam Sheppard, growing up and crying for different events. There were eighteen different pages, starting with him falling down off of his bike. He stood in the middle of the page with water streaming out of his eyes like they were faucets. 18 different events! Including; not being picked for kickball, and getting made fun of at the school dance. There were also some that brought into question the idea that it was a children's book, like the “erectile dysfunction page”, and the one that followed, the “walking in on your cheating wife” page. The story ended with the regret of leaving a company 3 months before their value increased by 100,000%. The other reason why people argued it wasn't a children's book was because of the amount of misspelled words. Besides the word 'cry' on every page including the cover being spelled 'c-r-i-e', there were a total of 7 other misspelled words. Asked years later why he didn't use an editor for his book, he simply claimed to lack a filter and wanted the world to see him unedited and raw.
The book was a bestseller. Mainly because we were all expected, ordered, to put it on our Nile wishlists. Coupled with our expectations to put at least 20 of our personal things up on the Nile as offering, people would buy the books in bulk to get access to all of our possessions. Eventually, the book almost broke the system and the policy was changed, or better yet decriminalized.
If you couldn't tell by the name, I'm Indian. I'm third generation American, of what my white friends used to call the dot not the feather Indian family. If I asked them about it now, they would deny ever saying it, just like they would deny voting for Frash, the country music star, who had won the presidency on a campaign filled with xenophobia and white populism. With campaign slogans like "White could be Right" and "Europe Immigrants Only," America had unanimously declared him unfit for the presidency. 'Frash is Trash' was a common chant throughout the year. Poll after poll had him at a low 12 percent chance of winning, because everyone agreed he was terrible, out loud. But when all was quiet, in those voting booths, they were quickly filling in his bubble.
Damnit, now Frash is taking up my memoir. I have to get through this. I have to explain the circumstances that led up to this. I have to explain how my roommates, my crush and I became murderers.
Shit. I'm out of time. I'll write more about it tomorrow. I have to go smoke before my head explodes! I'll explain! “
- From the written journal of Sid Patel of MVD#19097997676-3602379175