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"Lots of us find it a very helpful, human, sometimes humorous, always interesting, often surprising column that has no peer on the freelance market, And, yes, you can use that as a testimonial if it helps."
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"No one talks about the ups and downs of technology like Michael Finley. See his columns online at www.mfinley.com/. -- James S. Derk, Evansville (IN) Courier

"Editors want everything to fall into a neat little box, and your stuff doesn't do that. You don't write merely about technology, you write about what technology means to us and how it has changed us. I like it." -- John Boxmeyer, St. Paul

It was the last holiday party of the season, a Day-After-New-Year's open house. What was special about it for me was that I got to talk to people who had made their careers the past 20 years in Minnesota's computer industry.

One group, seated in the living room, used to be on a team at the state's top computer company. Mention that company's name and you summoned up images of insuperable speed, power, and, once upon a time, profitability. But times changed, and competitors swiped the company's lunch, and management seemed unable to deal with the suddenness of the company's reversals.

Eventually the company, once a member of the Fortune 500, was acquired by an up and coming Silicon Valley firm - a firm that had no real appreciation for what that company had done, and no clear plan for the new division once they acquired it.

Of the four men and one woman in the living room, swirling sangrias in paper cups, all but one had been driven away. They now worked for more conventional companies, selling products inspiring far less in the way of gee--whiz - business application software.

These were people who a decade earlier would have been tech-crazed kids, gobbling chips and plinking away into the night. Now they were graying, and soberer than red wine could overcome. The departees were embarrassed to admit they had landed on such mundane terrain, pointing out that they were in charge of grand meta-issues, like operating platforms, not the dippy minutiae of accounting software.

The sole remaining member of the team had that faraway look of someone who was still suffering, and still gutting it out. I knew from conversations with him that working for that company in its heyday was a source of unabashed pride for him. Now it was a source of only sadness.

Everyone on the team, whether they had bailed out and joined another company, or stayed on to slug it out on the mother ship, had slipped permanently in the vale of Dilbertia - the land of no hope, where work was no longer stimulating, and where people could not be trusted.

It was plain how much they missed the glory days, and how gloomily they assessed the future. Yet their kids pounded through the living rooms, chasing one another and laughing and shouting. What did they know?

I went to the kitchen to freshen my drink. There I met a fiftyish neighbor who seemed to know me. "Mike Finley," he said. "Help me, where do I know you from?"

"I write an essay about technology on the Internet," I offered.

"No, that's not it," he said, to my dismay.

Eventually he remembered that I had called him three years earlier to do an interview for PC Week about a new company he was heading up. The interview never took place, but he remembered me anyway. Sharp guy.

"Oh boy," he said. "Could I tell you a story or two now. When we spun off we weren't given a chance in hell. But I'm telling you, it was the best thing that could have happened. Out from under the waste and repetition of the parent company, we came to life. The old company was way too forgiving. Our ethic now is based on performance, and people are really coming around to it."

I asked how many people were there now. The number had dropped from 9,000 to 6,000.

"See, we're not insulated from reality any more. Bad things happen, then we come roaring back."

I nodded, and sipped my drink.

"You know the awful thing? I go out to Silicon Valley, and they're starting to fall into the same traps as the blue chips. The CEOs are getting now, and teams worry more about job security and less about the great new thing they're working on. People act more professional. Makes you want to cry."

"Maybe it's a life cycle thing," I say. "Maybe it's just not possible for an industry to stay young forever, even with all the IPOs and dot-com startups to keep things hopping."

"You gotta go with the rhythm," my senior management acquaintance told me. "You know what it is - it's like a roaring bonfire. Every so often we get trashed and die. We have to, to come back to life as something better."

The man in the kitchen tipped his glass toward me. "Denial doesn't work," he said. "Protecting yourself contractually doesn't work. Surrounding yourself with people just like you doesn't work. Slow suffering doesn't work.

"Systems," he said, nodding emphatically - "systems don't work.

"You gotta be ready to lose catastrophically, all the time. You need a hot fire, and you need to heap it high."

And that was how my holiday ended, with these grim images of progress. Next day I packed up the plastic wreaths and gathered up the colored lights on a spool.

Maybe we wish ourselves good luck too often, when what we need is occasional pain, and a healthy rebound.