Breakfast with Burnout Boy

Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2001

Burnout Boy scrutinized the menu, then squinted at me over the top of it.

"You're paying for this, right?"

"Oh, yes," I said, flustered. "Of course. Sure. It's on Dr. Dobb's."

Anyway, I would turn in the bill and hope to get reimbursed, but there was no way I was going to make a 16-year-old unemployed orphan pay for his own breakfast.

Technically, I suppose, Burnout Boy wasn't an orphan, since his parents were both alive. But they hadn't contributed to his support in two years, not since he disinherited them just before taking his dot-com public in 1999. That was one of the colorful details about this former dot-com boy millionaire that made me think that he might be an interesting interview subject. His having changed his name twice, once to Bitboy and later, after his dot-com went bust, to Burnout Boy, was another.

The waitress came and we placed our orders. This turned out to be more complicated than I expected, as Burnout Boy explained to the waitress that if they had mimosas on the menu then they must have champagne back in the kitchen and that she should just stop arguing and bring us a bottle and let the chef figure out a price for it later. He wore her down and she soon delivered his champagne, eggs benedict, fruit platter, Belgian waffles, chocolate mousse, double latte, and a box of crayons, "for doodling on the placemat," and my toast and coffee.

"Did you bring your book?" he asked, sipping the bubbly and slipping the crayons in his pocket.

I'm always appreciative when someone asks for an autographed copy of my book, as I uncapped my pen. He consulted a piece of paper that he pulled from his pants' pocket.

"Write, 'For Alfred, with apologies for not putting in more stories about Jack Tramiel,'" he told me.

I stared. "Alfred?"

"One of my eBay customers," he explained.

I must have looked either confused or offended, because he went on: "I don't have any more room for books in my library. I get mail-bombed with books. I told Oprah when she interviewed me that what I most needed was books, and she passed the word on to her viewers. Those people are strange, dude."

"So you get a lot of books in the mail."

"Dozens every day. But not all from Oprah's droids. A lot of them are from ex-employees."

"Really?"

"Yeah, they send me "Dummies" books. Business Plans for Dummies, Starting an Online Business for Dummies. Also Penn and Teller's How to Play in Traffic. They think they're so funny."

"It must be painful to think that they still resent you for your business failure."

"Actually they were doing this kind of stuff while the business was doing well. They just hate my guts. In fact, the Dummies thing was my idea. I secretly planted the meme of sending me Dummies books when the business went under, and they fell for it."

"You wanted them to send you books?"

"Why not? I can sell them on eBay for ten cents on the dollar, often more. And the cool thing is, my ex-customers caught the meme. Now they're sending me books. Plus an occasional poisonous spider, but you can sell anything on eBay."

Like crayons, I thought. "You seem to have a gift for turning adversity into a fast buck."

He grinned. "You don't know the half of it. You see this sweatshirt?" He was wearing a day-glo pink sweatshirt with a large hole in each elbow, emblazoned with chartreuse lettering two-inches high reading, "All your base are belong to us." I saw it all right.

"Pathetic, isn't it? That slogan is so tired they'd put it on the cover of Wired. And I had to pay double for the holes in the elbows. But it helps with the image."

I had heard that Wired was embracing a more staid editorial voice these days, but what he said was shocking.

"You paid extra for holes in the elbows?"

"Double. Of course when I say I paid, I mean '60 Minutes' paid. I told them I needed a new sweatshirt for the interview, and they ponied up."

"I bet they did," I thought as the waitress brought me the bill.

Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com