Silicon Follies

Welcome to Silicon Valley -- where fortunes are fast, dating's dysfunctional, and computer geeks rule. Meet Paul Armstrong, a late-twenties computer "e;consultant"e; who sits in his cubicle at TeraMemory wondering where it all went horribly wrong. "e;Well, I wasn't always a nerd. I started out as a liberal-arts type in college -- though I aggressively concealed this on my resume. Hiring managers don't like it. Non-technical outside interests. Bad sign."e; Watch him order a latte from the ofce coffee cart and poke at his Chinese lunch special while his longtime pal Steve Hall, hacker extraordinaire, accuses him of selling out to The Man. "e;When the money dries up, this place will be just like anywhere else. It was never the place, anyway -- that's what The Man will never understand."e; Meet The Man himself: Barry Dominic, the amboyant, lecherous, millionaire founder of TeraMemory. He insists they're poised to revolutionize networking with a cutting-edge technology, appropriately called WHIP. "e;Nobody fucks with Barry Dominic."e; That's where Liz Toulouse comes in. A Stanford English Lit grad and TeraMemory marketing associate, she accidentally cc's the entire company a snide e-mail about The Man's bad grammar on her very rst day.... "e;If only I'd had any idea. I'd have stayed in school. I'd have changed majors. Gotten a master's. Anything."e; Welcome to Silicon Follies, a hilarious dot.comedy of ambition and disillusionment in a land of luck, loss, and sometimes even love.