THE WIND PHONE
It Took Me Three Months to Find Out My Friend Died
I felt bad
My friend Bill died in 2011. It was a sad moment. He was a good man.
What makes me sadder is I didn’t know for three months.
We were good friends who met in the nineties when our two companies became business partners. My job was to support our resell partners, and Bill's company was one of our best groups.
I worked with him on product presentations, sales demos, and customer meetings. On average, we communicated with each other three days out of five, weekly. Business was good, and the future seemed bright.
We were sales heroes with the right product, customer base, and stable companies behind us—or so we thought.
One day in the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble burst, which was messy for many people. A lot of tech companies couldn’t maintain their valuation, which had a debilitating down-market effect. There was a glut of products and services and not enough business to go around. The tech sector collapsed due to questionable accounting practices, ego-driven boards, and overly aggressive commitments.
The company I worked for was in trouble when multiple millions of dollars in orders were canceled. To prevent bankruptcy, they agreed to a…
