From dotcommer to Columbanus pilgrim
Monday April 12 2004
We were in his corner office in a building in the Silicon Valley. I had told him I wanted to leave my high-paying job and return to Dublin, and he was making sure I understood the ramifications. I did, and couldn't wait to leave. I wanted my life back.
As the prospects for the technology sector improve and more jobs become available again, it's worth exploring the fate of some of the original dot-com employees such as me.
In the book Microserfs, published at the start of the Internet boom, Douglas Coupland writes: "The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists."
I had been a smart generalist, and since 1995 I'd worked in technology, attracted like many others to the maverick spirit of companies that promised to overturn the way business worked.
I joined Nua, one of the country's first website developers, a clever if wayward bunch that knew only a little bit more about the Internet than their clients. We offered "new thinking for the digital age" - it said so on our business cards.
After Nua I went to Kansas to work as our man on the prairies for a Dublin e-learning company that had a deal with a university there. I enjoyed the independence of being a continent away from my boss, but after 18 months of retreat in the small college town, I moved to the Silicon Valley in northern California.
It was 1999, and the original maverick spirit had been augmented by greed. A lot of people believed that if they were making history, they should be handsomely rewarded for it.
The stock markets agreed for a time and there was so much money around you could lose your black Porsche among all the others parked outside the Redwood City Safeway. I was beginning to feel disillusioned and tired. I'd fallen into tech work and while I'd enjoyed the early days because it hadn't felt like a real job, now I was working mad hours and taking planes every week.
I returned to Dublin and vowed never to work in an office again (or at least not until my savings ran out). But what to do instead? I was looking for the exact opposite of the Internet industry.
Something slow, low-tech, and genuinely historical; like riding my bicycle from Northern Ireland to northern Italy in pursuit of bad-ass Celtic saint Columbanus who had crossed Europe in the seventh century, founding monasteries and picking fights with popes and kings.
Researching the trip was great - having studied the period in college, I hit the libraries again and ambled around town like a recently released prisoner. But I was nervous starting the journey - I liked bikes, but I'd never undertaken such a long trip on my own.
I soon found my cycling legs, however, and a month of eating my way through small French towns was more rewarding than a year of project-strategy meetings.
Luxeuil (where Columbanus founded three monasteries) welcomed me as a long-lost friend, and I was interviewed by the local paper, and stopped in the street as news of my journey spread.
Next came affluent Switzerland and the tiny state of Liechtenstein (available for hire if you're looking for an unusual party location).
Riding uphill for three days, I reached the top of a snowy pass over the Alps, and sped down the other side facing black tunnels and sharp hairpins.
Somehow I reached Lake Como in one piece. The saint was clearly looking after me - I travelled 2,000 miles without a puncture.
The final leg through Milan and into the Appenines brought me to Bobbio, Columbanus's last resting place, and an Irish town centuries before the foundation of Dublin.
The journey had started as an excuse for a good holiday, and an antidote to the grind of work, but now I'd reached my destination I realised that it had assumed a greater importance. I'd achieved something difficult with good humour and more resolve than I thought I possessed.
I returned to Dublin and real life resumed - I now ride the bike to work down the East Wall Road. But the day job funds other adventures; last summer I rode my bicycle down the Mississippi from Minnesota to New Orleans.
I recently met up with some of the original Nua employees, and while many of us are still in Internet-related jobs, we've learned they are no better or worse than most other jobs. Recovering dot-commers like myself have to look elsewhere for meaning. And that's no bad thing.
The Accidental Pilgrim' by David Moore is published by Hodder Headline Ireland and is available now from all good bookshops priced €15
- David Moore
