Back in another life, during the Dot-Boom, I put a poster of Bhutan up on the window in front of my computer, at the start-up ISP I was working at. We had racks of modems attached to phone lines, awesome amazing bandwidth in the form of multiple T1's (ok, 2), dedicated dial-in CS 900i's, Portmasters, and ISDN lines. And we had a bunch of college kids who wanted to max their hours in the summer, which meant I could take 3 months off. I looked at that poster of Bhutan, through fall/winter/spring, through infuriating calls by frustrated win3.1 and win95 users, through post-set-up office network discussions running on 28.8bps modems, through all the calls blinking hold when our network crashed, through paranoid crazies who'd lined their windows with tin foil looking for tech support, through people wandering lost through http protocols.
I was for awhile a Chief Network Engineer, surfing a wave I didn't care about, making more money than I could spend. I'd graduated and fallen into the gig a few weeks later, because I had a BA degree, no actual plans, and a close friendship with a couple I respected who had started an ISP in the late 90s. Internet Service Provider, for those of you who missed that phase.
Verizon, which was Bell Atlantic (BA) then was our nemesis and our host. We were, from their perspective, parasites - reselling their data in a way that was perfectly legal and profoundly problematic for them, since we were making more money off of it than they were. BA didn't know how to handle the Dot Boom, and suddenly we and others were interloping, buying up phone lines, ISDN lines, T1's and so on. That's what got me to Bhutan.
