Permanent Record

Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Vision of Escaflowne, Rurouni
Kenshin, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Trigun, The Slayers, and my
personal favorite, Ghost in the Shell.
One of these new friends—I’ll call her Mae—was an older woman,
much older, at a comfortably adult twenty-five. She was something of an
idol to the rest of us, as a published artist and avid cosplayer. She was my

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Japanese conversation partner and, I was impressed to find out, also ran a
successful Web-design business that I’ll call Squirrelling Industries, after
the pet sugar gliders she occasionally carried around in a purple felt Crown
Royal bag.
That’s the story of how I became a freelancer: I started working as a
Web designer for the girl I met in class. She, or I guess her business, hired
me under the table at the then lavish rate of $30/hour in cash. The trick was
how many hours I’d actually get paid for.
Of course, Mae could’ve paid me in smiles—because I was smitten, just
totally in love with her. And though I didn’t do a particularly good job of
concealing that, I’m not sure that Mae minded, because I never missed a
deadline or even the slightest opportunity to do a favor for her. Also, I was a
quick learner. In a company of two, you’ve got to be able to do everything.
Though I could, and did, conduct my Squirrelling Industries business
anywhere—that, after all, is the point of working online—she preferred that
I come into the office, by which I mean her house, a two-story town house
that she shared with her husband, a neat and clever man whom I’ll call
Norm.
Yes, Mae was married. What’s more, the town house that she and Norm
lived in was located on base at the southwestern edge of Fort Meade, where
Norm worked as an air force linguist assigned to the NSA. I can’t tell you if
it’s legal to run a business out of your home if your home is federal property
on a military installation, but as a teenager infatuated with a married woman
who was also my boss, I wasn’t exactly going to be a stickler for propriety.
It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade was almost
entirely accessible to anyone. It wasn’t all bollards and barricades and
checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base
housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic,
windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate and show ID. It
seemed like every other weekend or so a quarter of my Japanese class
would congregate in Mae’s little house behind NSA headquarters to watch
anime and create comics. That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days
when “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every
schoolyard and sitcom.
On workdays I’d show up at Mae’s in the morning, pulling into her cul-
de-sac after Norm left for the NSA, and I’d stay through the day, until just

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before he returned. On the occasions that Norm and I happened to overlap
during the two years or so I spent working for his wife, he was, all things
considered, kind and generous to me. At first, I assumed that he was
oblivious to my infatuation, or had such a low opinion of my chances as a
seducer that he didn’t mind leaving me alone with his wife. But one day,
when we happened to pass each other—him going, me coming—he politely
mentioned that he kept a gun on the nightstand.
Squirrelling Industries, which was really just Mae and me, was pretty
typical of basement start-ups circa the dot-com boom, small enterprises
competing for scraps before everything went bust. How it worked was that
a large company—a carmaker, for instance—would hire a major ad agency
or PR firm to build their website and just generally spiff up their Internet
presence. The large company would know nothing about building websites,
and the ad agency or PR firm would know only slightly more—just enough
to post a job description seeking a Web designer at one of the then
proliferating freelance work portals.
Mom-and-pop 
operations—or, 
in 
this 
case, 
older-married-
woman/young-single-man operations—would then bid for the jobs, and the
competition was so intense that the quotes would be driven ridiculously
low. Factor in the cut that the winning contractor would have to pay to the
work portal, and the money was barely enough for an adult to survive on,
let alone a family. On top of the lack of financial reward, there was also a
humiliating lack of credit: the freelancers could rarely mention what
projects they’d done, because the ad agency or PR firm would claim to have
developed it all in-house.
I got to know a lot about the world, particularly the business world, with
Mae as my boss. She was strikingly canny, working twice as hard as her
peers to make it in what was then a fairly macho industry, where every
other client was out to screw you for free labor. This culture of casual
exploitation incentivized freelancers to find ways to hack around the
system, and Mae had a talent for managing her relationships in such a way
as to bypass the work portals. She tried to cut out the middlemen and third