Tales From My Past - Dot-Com Madness

Do you remember the good old days? 1999? Back when Y2K was making people dig holes in their back yards? When the Euro was new and worth less than a dollar? When Brandi Chastain stripped for America at the World Cup? When the dot-com bubble hadn't yet burst, when companies who made nothing and provided no service were trading for $50 a share? When people who had no business playing in the stock market got their own personal accounts and traded their salary like it was Monopoly money?
   Ahh.... good times.
   Back then I worked for a soul-less, privately-held corporation - which is different from a soul-less public corporation in that it's easier for the private corp to lie - that was spending money as if they printed their own. Which they may have been doing. They were just figuring out the power of the Internet to drive their business, and one of the projects I was working on was creating a centralized customer database. I used specific software to get this done, and that software company held a 'user's conference' every year, which was, as we all now know, just another sales call and an excuse to spend far too much money. But since I was overworked and underpaid I got to go. Score one for Don.
   The software company rented out Universal Studios in Orlando, FL. The entire place, just for four hundred or so conference attendees. They had plenty of food and performers in costume and all the rides were open. It was crazy and fun, and had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the software product. Even though I felt a little guilty about it, I did eat their food and ride their rides and talk to the guy dressed as Captain America.
   Our regional sales manager took us to a very expensive Italian restaurant and picked up the entire tab, liquor included, for seventy people. When they found out I used to work at an Italian restaurant they made me pick the wines, and when I balked at the $90 bottle - we'd have needed at least six bottles to cover everyone drinking, minimum $540 - they just laughed and told me to get what I thought was best. So I did. I'm sure the liquor tab alone was over $1000.
   We got tons of branded crap. Empty notebooks, scratch pads, pens, watches, spiral-bound ledgers, and acres of slick product marketing junk. All of it free to us, none of it free to produce.
   When I think of the money that one company wasted in just four days, and how much better their financial position would be right now if they hadn't spent it...
   Aww, who am I trying to kid? I want those old days back. The spendthrift, crazy dot-com days, when a simple analyst got treated like a king, on the off chance that he might tell the decision-makers at a company to keep using a product they'd already bought. Come on, people, whatever happened to irrational exuberance?