In May of 2000, I received a call from a former classmate, Grant, asking me if I wanted to escape the confines of Albuquerque and work for an internet startup in Seattle. The founder, an ego-driven Stanford dropout, wanted a geek girl to round out his team of coders and be an unofficial face of Uglyguppy.com. Because I went through a boobs-and-Betty-Page bangs phase for most of my time in school and I could write a search function, Grant recommended me. They offered me the job without interviewing.

You have to remember in the summer of 2000, Internet startups were still considered the grails of computing, where geeks were paid like minor deities for pushing the boundaries of nerddom, or at least writing cool web pages. Being recruited by a startup was the golden ticket. And, in the summer of 2000, I was festering in a Ph.D. program, bored with my chosen topic, saddled with debt and the idea of teaching snot-nosed business majors the basics of C++ made me want to cry.  I said yes without even thinking. Within a week, I told my committee to shove it, packed all of my belongings into my battered blue Honda Civic and drove the 1500 miles north to my destiny.

"I give it six weeks," Paul said on my first morning. He had driven up with me and was kicking around my hotel room, waiting for his cab to whisk him to the airport. He pushed open the curtains and frowned at Lake Washington. "Six weeks before you call me up and scream you can't take it anymore."

"Ye of little faith," I called from the bathroom. I was doing my lipstick for the fifth time that morning. "I am the unofficial pretty face of uglyguppy.com." I stuck my head around the door and lifted my eyebrows.

"No," he grinned. "You're the official clown face."

I threw a towel at him before going back to the bathroom to do my makeup again. "Why six weeks?" I asked.

He wandered in and sat on the closed toilet. "Well," he said with a thoughtful face. "For one, you're prone to seasonal affective disorder. When the sun's gone and it's raining all the time, you'll bum right out, and I won't be around to shove you under a spectrum lamp.  Two, too much green freaks you out, and have you noticed the trees here are fuzzy?"

"It's disturbing," I agreed.

He continued. "And three, where are you going to get your chile fix?"

He had a point. New Mexicans, as a species, are mad for the long, green chiles harvested in areas like Hatch. They can range from mild to blindingly hot and we use them in every aspect of our diet. I've always been particularly fond of chopped green chile on top of my cheeseburger, and I've been known to drink green chile salsa like it was a Coke.

I leaned against the sink and sighed. "You're just going to have to send it to me," I sighed.  "I'm sure I'll be in an apartment by the time the new harvest comes in, so I'll buy a nice large freezer and you FedEx me a couple of bushels and I'll be fine."

Paul made a face. "Won't you suffer from separation anxiety?"

I didn't answer, because we both knew the answer. I had no clue how I was going to function without him and vice versa. Until that moment, the longest we'd been separated was four days. I started crying and it messed up my makeup. His cab showed up a few minutes later and it was time for me to skip off to work. We hugged, long and tight, and I said I'd see him at Christmas. His last gesture was to ruffle my hair and repeat his prediction.

Damn how he was right, though it wasn't for a lack of trying on my part.  From launch to fold, Uglyguppy.com lasted thirty-five business days.

I should have known I hadn't signed on with a Google-caliber company when, on the first morning, our fearless founder announced we'd start team building by taking a week-long luxury cruise up to Alaska and I was the only employee to lug a laptop along.

The founder and "creative director" of Uglyguppy, Mac Mackenzie, didn't have a solid vision for his company, outside of spending his backers' capital. He hired a staff at ungodly salaries. He rented an old warehouse near the piers and spent money converting it into the perfect office environment. Money was spent on state-of-the-art workstations, video game setups for every employee, a private chef, an on-call massage therapist and a feng shui expert. Part of the building was cordoned off to make loft apartments for each of us. While the apartments were under construction, he put us up in a luxurious boutique hotel that cost more a night than a semester at UNM. He sent us on the cruise for team building. He had lattes delivered three times a day. He gave us each our own company-leased BMW 325i. The man knew no limits of his AmEx gold card.

There was only one problem. Mac Mackenzie didn't have a solid vision for his website. He'd come up with the name for the website while walking across campus, and figured it was enough to ditch school and start taking meetings with venture capitalists. He said he figured the name would dictate the product.

During the cruise, he talked about his idea of selling high-end saltwater aquariums as part of a "lifestyle package" to young professionals who wanted all of the prestige of owning clown fish. He envisioned a site where an order would be placed for an aquarium, and a team of aquarium experts, including a marine biologist, would be dispatched across the country by jet to walk the consumer through setup and fish selection.

When we returned from our Alaskan adventure on Business Day Six, Mac's vision had shifted to selling high-end saltwater fish, minus the marine biologists. In his new outlook for the company, we'd lure the customers in with amusing animated cartoons featuring our mascot, the Ugly Guppy. "We'll hire an artist and an animator," he said, scribbling notes on a napkin during our breakfast meeting. "We'll also need a comedy writer to do the scripts. We'll need about a week's lead time for a five minute sketch, but I think it'll be enough to keep our clients returning."

I raised my hand. "What about product, Mac?"

He touched his nose at me. "Good thinking, Harriet. We'll launch a line of Ugly Guppy logo t-shirts, hats and mouse pads. Maybe even a plushy doll. Okay, we'll need to hire a seamstress to get started on the Ugly Guppy plushy prototype."

On Business Day Nine, our fearless leader decided we need more team building and sent us an hour out of the city for an afternoon of paint ball. I wore my hair in a braid, a wife beater and olive drab cargo pants without even thinking of the implications. At the end of the battle, when I'd tagged every single guy between the eyes at least once, they dubbed me Tomb Raider. I refused to answer to it, but secretly, I loved the idea of being a "living-breathing Lara Croft" (as our fearless leader described me in PR material), even though my boobs were smaller and my waist was thicker.

On Business Day Seventeen, the website live. Visitors were greeted by the Ugly Guppy  swimming around orange barrels and behind an "Under Construction" sign. It was enough for our investors. On Business Day Eighteen, we had our IPO. I thought that was a good sign. I thought that now we were a publicly traded company, Mac would get serious about bringing a product to market. I thought my coworkers would get serious about writing code. I was wrong on both counts.

Mac never did make up his mind on uglyguppy's focus. And my co-workers? The rest of the crew was comprised of burned out, fourth-rate code monkeys who spent their days playing video games and showed no interest in working. Grant, the guy who'd recruited me in the first place, had read the signs and jumped ship even before launch, taking a position with Microsoft. I only wish I had been as intelligent.

On Business Day Thirty-Four, the stock tanked from $139 to three cents. On Business Day Thirty-Five, burley men in coveralls repossessed the contents of the warehouse, and the woman at the front desk of the hotel told me I'd have to come up with the rack rate or find other accommodations.

I called Paul from a Motel Six in Tacoma. "I'm coming home," I whimpered into the phone. "The Guppy's dead. Long live the guppy."

He whooped with joy. Three days later, I was back in Albuquerque, living in his grandmother's guest house and wheedling my way back into grad school.

By the time I received my masters in December, the tech sector had vanished and Paul had discovered girls.

Career first. The only job I could find in my field was working as a third shift IT girl for a faceless corporation's Albuquerque outpost. My job is fairly simple; for eleven bucks an hour, I  keep all hell from breaking lose on the servers between the hours of 5 p.m. and 1 a.m., and keep tabs on employees' internet usage. In other words, I read other people's e-mail for a living.

The hours suck and my world's become pretty insular. I sleep when everyone's working and work when everyone's sleeping. My only regular human contact comes from Daisy, Paul's grandmother and my landlady. I live in her guest cottage and work as her perpetual house-sitter. Oh, and Paul, of course. His trust fund lifestyle allows that.

Did I mention Paul comes from money? I imagine guest cottage begins to give you an idea. But "rich" doesn't begin to describe his family's financial comfort. Also, "rich" makes me come off as a working-class girl dazzled by a string of zeros, and I hate that. No, for our purposes here, the Matchetts are wealthy. Seriously wealthy.  Like Paul-couldn't-get-into-college-so-his-dad-built-a-classroom-wing wealthy.

And let me tell you, Paul plays it up to his advantage. When we were in school, he was still so uncomfortable in his skin that it never occurred to him women would like him simply for his Visa card. He was a geek with a goatee and a collection of message t-shirts. He was walking girl repellent. But when I moved to Seattle and he had to fly solo, he discovered if he introduced himself as Paul Matchett, the panties would come off.

When I came back from Seattle, he'd adopted the playboy image (and wardrobe; I had to talk him out of the smoking jacket) and collected a string of bubble-headed beauties. Believe me, his choice in women hasn't done any favors for my self-esteem. He's dated every skinny skank in town, including all of your friends.

Still, he ends up in my kitchen most nights after closing time, smoking and drinking my coffee, pretending like we're the only two people in the world.