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Jewish World Review June 25, 2012 / 5 Tammuz, 5772 A young entrepreneur who knows squat By Malcolm Fleschner
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
We've finally reached the end of the school year, and you know what that means: A freshly minted crop of bright-eyed college graduates casting their hopeful gazes toward the future, mulling the endless possibilities before them, and leaving campus life behind forever as they take that big next step -- moving back in with their parents.
Because, sadly, no matter how bright-eyed the class of graduates, the job market for young people these days remains downright gloomy, causing recent alumni to scamper back home faster than Punxsutawney Phil after catching a glimpse of his shadow.
In fact, many recent college graduates who move back in with their parents are, according to one group of demographic researchers, "selfish and lazy slobs who leave dirty dishes and unwashed laundry all over the place, forcing their parents to do so much extra cleaning that they barely have time for their actual work as demographic researchers."
I was reminded of the perennial problem facing new graduates and parents when I read the story of Eric Simons, an enterprising 19-year-old who worked tirelessly out of AOL's Palo Alto offices last year, developing an educational software program. So what, right? Practically living at work while writing code is what programmers do when they're not tooling around town in $150,000 sports cars and partying with supermodels (note: most of my information about programmers comes from watching "The Social Network").
But Simons' story is unique in two important ways: first, he wasn't practically living at the AOL offices -- he was literally living there -- eating, sleeping, showering, texting, shower texting -- taking care of all of a 19-year-old's basic life necessities. And second, Eric was not even an AOL employee! He originally gained access to the building as part of a program the company runs to encourage budding entrepreneurs, but when the program ended and Simons found himself broke and with nowhere to go, he had the novel thought, "Hey, why go at all?"
Using his still-operational passkey to get into the building, Simons subsisted on a diet of ramen noodles, trail mix and cereal provided by AOL, showered in the on-site gym and slept on a variety of different sofas he discovered in lightly trafficked areas of the building. During the day Simons toiled away at developing a software application that helps teachers distribute lesson plans more effectively. Sadly, his experiment in corporate squatting came to an abrupt end after two months when a suspicious-minded AOL manager caught him one morning splayed out on a sofa, clearly having spent the whole night there ("The Spiderman pajamas gave him away," the manager explained).
Since the story of the so-called "AOL Squatter" broke last month, some have criticized Simons for taking improper advantage of AOL's generosity. But this country has a long and proud tradition of squatters taking up residence in living spaces to which they have, at best, dubious claim. In fact, that's pretty much the entire history of the United States in a nutshell. So clearly, if you're critical of Simons' squatting, you must hate America.
But most observers feel a grudging respect for Simons' ingenuity and moxie. Because let's face it, if you're looking to work in the tech industry and you don't want anyone to find you, what better place to hide than at AOL? Who even knew AOL still existed? And now, thanks to the publicity he's received, Eric has even drummed up interest from investors, including one venture capital firm that's already pumped $50,000 into his startup. An added bonus: hearing that a person can haul in 50 grand just for crashing on someone else's sofa will come as welcome news to the nation's legion of deadbeat brother-in-laws.
Which brings us to a solution to the problem I mentioned at the beginning of this column (so you don't have to look: it's recent college graduates moving back in with their parents). What with all the time kids spend on the Internet, watching television and movies, eating junk food and playing video games, corporations are probably even more responsible than actual parents for raising today's children. And as Mitt Romney has confirmed, corporations are people. So instead of moving back in with their parents, college grads with no place else to go should clearly follow Eric Simons' lead and move in with the "people" who really raised them: corporations.
If you think about it, it's the perfect solution. Kids and their (biological) parents don't have to live together again, risking reopening old wounds and causing irreparable family discord, while corporations get to fill all that unused office space since the last round of layoffs. Really, for the cost of a few cases of ramen noodles and a couple of extra sofas around the office, is that so much to ask of corporations? To help keep the American family together?
JWR contributor Malcolm Fleschner is a humor columnist for The DC Examiner. Let him know what you think by clicking here.
© 2006, Malcolm Fleschner |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
