’What’s happened to me?’ he texted no one in particular. It wasn’t a dream. His dorm room, a proper community college dorm room although a little too small, lay peacefully between it’s four supermodel and athlete covered walls. A collection of networking conference name badges lay spread out on the Ikea Bjursta—Toledo was an aspiring entrepreneur—and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of Fast Company and housed in a nice but fake wood frame. It showed a 20-year old internet billionaire wearing a T-shirt and jeans, slouching casually and looking utterly unconcerned in an office chair.
Toledo then turned to look out the window at the typical Portland weather. Through his internal microphone, raindrops could be heard hitting the non-touch enabled pane, which made him feel quite sad. ‘How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense,’ he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his stomach, and in his present state couldn’t get into that position. However hard he tried to roll over, he only managed to slide further through the set of application menus on his touch screen belly. He must have tried it a hundred times, turned off his camera so that he wouldn’t have to look at the sliding applications, and only stopped when he noticed his battery life percentage drop from 86 percent to 85 percent.
‘Oh God,’ he thought, ‘what an improbable career path I’ve chosen! Attending networking events and web seminars day in and day out. Starting a business like this takes much more effort than joining an established corporation, and on top of that there’s the curse of the new economy, worries about studying the right thing, fast food and junk food, incoming requests and invites from different people all of the time so that you can never really get to know anyone outside of a few party pictures of them on Facebook. It can all go to Hell!’
by Oyl Miller, McSweeny's | Read more:
Photo: Richard Termine via:
