I was working much too early on a Saturday, getting ready to set up network and Internet services at the ginormous convention center during a particularly hectic trade show. It was the heyday of Internet, and everybody wanted to have it in their exhibits. Their thoughts were that they could lure visitors into their booths by allowing them to check e-mail and surf the web, much like the fable cyber cafe that never quite took off. Well, this was the time of bad business plans, after all.

I had just configured a switch for the correct VLANs, and grabbed my Fluke network test tool to ping the Internet at the other end, which was in a cavernous, nearly empty exhibition hall amidst forklifts, freight and the bustle of innumerable salespeople and product representatives setting up hundreds of incredibly expensive booths. To boot, it was about a half mile away, and two elevator rides on top of that.

Jesse, as we’ll call him, had just come in. He had ink stamps on the back of his hand and large, grooved scratches down his forearm. He hadn’t bathed and smelled like he’d been hanging out in some smoky locale like the Cotton Club. This kid, while a nice one, was a bit erratic and all over the place—probably on the verge of a major nervous or psychotic episodes that seem so common among those in their early twenties. He also happened to be the son of the vice president of the networking services company for which I was working. His father, a dedicated Day Trader who seemed to have no responsibilities other than to watch his E*Trade account, was concerned about the fact that he was trying to protect his family from the Devil, yet he had a son who was “trying to shake hands with him.”

“Scotty, I just saw Creed at the Cotton Club last night. You like Creed?”

He strummed an air guitar and started singing some incomprehensible grunge rock words at me about devouring me or something along those lines. I broke for the door.

“I’ll tell you about it, wait up.”

He threw a couple of telephone headsets on a cart and pushed it out the door in front of me with a cool kid flourish – looking sideways, upward trajectory on shove, sloping shoulder and peg leg motion on the pivot, a shake of the head to get the bangs out of his eyes. He followed me toward elevator one and babbled a lot about how much he loved Creed and how he had been too young to get into the show but had gotten a break because he saw the singer for Creed outside the club and asked him to try and get him into the show despite his underage status, which the singer hooked him up.

“I found him after the set and said, ‘dude, you’re a genius. You’re even better than Cobain.’

I couldn’t let that pass. I had to ask., “what did he think of that?”

“He was a dick after that, but I still love Creed, man.”