San Francisco, California
September 19, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Anonymous, a computer-science student at an American university who has had several internships working in the computer industry. He was invited recently to interview with Microsoft for a three-month paid internship as a software engineer; but things did not go well for him in Redmond, as he relates in today’s letter.

Anonymous’s confession is the final episode in our trilogy of letters about office life in the digital age – its Revenge of the Jedi, if you will. The series began on Friday, with Adam Heimlich’s letter about different kinds of opportunity in the opportunity economy; it continued yesterday with a series of leaked memos from a manager at a Bay Area video-game company to his overworked and under-motivated employees.

Our first correspondent to write about modern cubicle life was Alivia Zivich; we published her letter back in July, about dot-com office politics and the search for the perfect office chair. So maybe this trilogy is really a quartet – though one with a really long break between chapter one and chapter two.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough