2.16.05
Letter from Santa Clara
“Don’t cry for me, Silicon Valley…I never really
loved you.” (Part I)
By
Bill Costley
"They’ve fired Carly!” Carolin said to me in the
pre-dawn dark, listening to KCBS-AM news-radio all night with an under-the
pillow speaker shaped like a white compact; every few years its thin-twin
wire breaks, requiring a trip to Radio Shack, but now that we’re back in
the Valley, Fry’s, for a replacement.
She didn’t say which Carly & I didn't have to ask
“Carly who?” It wasn't Carly Simon (daughter of Simon & Schuster, ex-wife
of James Taylor, most famous for singing “You’re So Vain,” allegedly about
Warren Beatty, brother of Shirley Maclaine, husband of Annette Bening,
most famous for directing & starring in “Reds” as Jack Reed, famous for
writing “Ten Days That Shook the World” about V. I. Lenin, famous for,
etc., until recently, now infamous in the same place, for the same stuff).
Now we may be California, but if you click down as
far as NorCal you’ll see Santa Clara's in Silicon Valley, over which only
one Carly has floated like a thinning Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
balloon for the past 6 yrs., Carly (Carleton) Fiorina, now suddenly ex-CEO
of Hewlett Packard (HP) that Carolin works for, as a contractor, from
home. Carly doomed our household like a malicious redheaded neo-tech
Marcel Marceau, sometimes just as silent, but we always knew her miming
led to fatal riffing (reductions-in-force.)
I figured Carly was bailing a few months ago when she
was bruited as being shopped by Dubya as undersecretary of commerce for
his 2nd & (hopefully,
forever last) term, probably because of her championing off-shoring jobs
which had an actual direct effect on the Valley & Carolin, whose diffused
work-group (now entirely virtual, spread nationwide, con-calling
worldwide) was dabbling with offshoring its workload to Hungary, South
Africa, etc. where English is also reliably spoken & written.
Speaking of which, not a word about Carly’s
firing/resignation appeared in Wed. 09 FEB 2005’s San Jose Mercury News,
plopped on our driveway around 05:30 PDT. So, having heard the news only
by radio, Carolin decided to go to the nearest locus of direct HP poop,
which in her case is the HP/Tandem facility in nearby Cupertino, with
which she maintains a cordial occasional cube-use relationship, most
recently necessitated by security changes to the intranet requiring
on-site, hands-on direct access.
There, nobody was sad about Carly’s sudden fall;
old-timer Tandemists had bled from latter-day Carly’s reductions, so one
of their wisest took Carolin out to lunch at the new Kebab Korner
(formerly the Galleria) on the hard-edge of our old Korea-town
neighborhood (cor. El Camino & Keily), where you can now pull on a hookah
with your kebab ($10; $15 w/out.) Carly-news was spreading fast by word of
mouth, but they had other I/O options. No Maltese Falcon stood guarding
the door of this new old-techno-crypt, but the Fat Man....
