OK, here's the deal

I've always wanted to write. Prefereably something really popular that generates a lot of money. Maybe not "Harry Potter" kind of money, but perhaps something along the line of Asimov's Robot series. You know, a group of loyal fans that will continue to buy sequels no matter the quality, allowing me to work a few days a year and vacation on the Riviera.

Alas, after a bitter internal battle complete with recriminations and some painful wedgies, the more practical side of me won out in college and I ended up with an Engineering degree and a pitiful lack of creative writing experience, unless you count the creative writing that went into some of the reseach papers that suddenly and inexplicably became due tomorrow at 8am. Since that time, I've been fortunate enough to write a variety of very technical articles and papers that have been published widely and read only by the parakeets in whose cages they have entually been deposited. And no one has ever paid for any of them or even asked for an autograph, even at those innumerable Geeknik trade shows with the cast of bearded thousands.

So, after years spent in the wilds of telecom, allowing my writing talent to shine only in the occasional pithy email missive, I've been forced by my latent less-practical side (now fully recovered but with a nasty attitude and lingering mild bruising) to start writing again. As my only recent experience has been in writing about telecom, it seemed like a good place to start. Plus, this way I can legitimately claim that time spent writing here is related to the time spent writing for my employer, who pays much better and occasionally feeds me.

Telecom is actually a ripe field for comedic exploitation. Really, you're going to have to trust me on this one. The telecom bubble of the last few years generated an innumerable list of completely ridiculous characters and experiences that have garnered very little attention outside of the aforementioned bearded thousands. There has been scandal, error, and sex (ok, not too much of that last one - this is about telecomm employees, after all), all of which are enormously entertaining for the observer if not for those who are too close to see the humor in, say, losing more money than the gross national product of Paraguay.

Finally, I must mention that nothing I write in here is in any way connected to the truth. And it is definitely not about you, your friends, or anyone that you have run into at a Geeknik. Sure, you many think it's about you, since the facts line up well with your experiences, the dates are the same, and the people involved have the same names and social security numbers. But believe me, it's all fictional. Really.

Let's see how this works out. Won't you please join me as Trolley turns the corner and enters the land of Telecommedy?