Give It Away.5

The ending

(Sometime later in 1997)

Along with the arrival of cooler weather and light rain in San Francisco came the final plans for a house-cleaning at Wired Inc. that would result in the removal of scores of people, including the founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe.

In their stead, the company was going to be dismantled and sold in pieces. The founders would be rewarded with a fair amount of compensation for their efforts, so they would be fine. Not so much everyone else.

At the top of the hit list was my name. I was to be replaced, naturally, by one of those who was always clamoring for my time in one-on-ones.

On a late afternoon when the sun was going down to the west, strangely there were no meetings on my calendar. It was wide open. I was suddenly summoned to Louis’s office.

I walked in to see three people waiting, none of smiling. Just three senior execs stiff and grim in manner. I was thanked for my service, given a small severance check, and summarily dismissed.

Louis was one of them and he looked sad. But he had nothing to say. This was not of his doing. And that, I suppose, is the end of my story.

I had prepared myself emotionally as much as possible for this moment. I’d packed up my family pictures. As I drove away from 660 Third Street, I started humming an old song by Merle Haggard.

EPILOGUE

Probably our most significant accomplishment during my tenure, Wired News, survived the purge and exists to this day.

And in one of life’s strangely ironic twists, my oldest daughter, Laila, who would soon become an award-winning journalist herself, worked as as an intern at Wired News during the first decade of the new millennium.

None of her colleagues knew that her father had been one of the executives involved in creating Wired News or what that experience had been like, and neither did she.

But I think about this now and then when I see how our society has become divided by conspiracy theories, fake news and the like. Once upon a time a few of us tried to prevent that.

THE LYRICS:

“That’s the Way Love Goes”

Sung by Merle Haggard

Written by Lefty Frizzell and Sanger D. Shafer

I've been throwing horseshoes
Over my left shoulder
I've spent most all my life
Searching for that four-leaf clover

Yet you ran with me
Chasing my rainbows
Honey, I love you too
That's the way love goes

That's the way love goes, babe
That's the music God made
For all the world to sing
It's never old, it grows
Losing makes me sorry
You say, "Honey, now don't worry
Don't you know I love you too?"
And that's the way love goes