From: Neil Weisenfeld
To: all-ai@ai.mit.edu
Subject: return to NE43
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 15:18:06 -0400 (EDT)

It's hard to believe that four years have gone by since they threw me out of this place. At first I was devastated. Then I was just embarrassed. I didn't want anyone to know so I took up smoking and loitered all day on the front steps figuring that people would just think that I was on a smoke break. But then the money ran out and I had to find something better to do with my days. Somehow I pulled myself together and got a respectable job. I was proud to be fully in charge of placing those black olives in the middle of each pizza that came out of the oven at the Main St. Bertucci's. In some small way, every pizza left with a little bit of my soul on it.

But soon I turned my sights to bigger and better things and formed the first (and still the only!) company specializing in year-3000 reengineering. The enormous potential offered by getting in on the ground floor was realized by only a few shrewd, but wealthy, investors. Now I'm driving around campus in a Hummer. You can't get that in academia.

I had started out in LCS and was fairly successful. My master's thesis entitled ``A Low Power Infrared Peer-to-Peer Network for Classroom Cheating'' was one of the most downloaded documents on the web site, despite all those things my advisor had said about it. But after moving to the AI lab everything took a tumble. My research into emotional kitchen appliances went well for a while, but after the smitten microwave was unable to do anything but make cooing noises at a particularly handsome visiting DARPA official during a demo, it was all over.

Ahh, here we are. The 7th floor. Hey, they've redecordated! I like the urban destruction theme. The live wires hanging from the ceiling are a particularly nice touch. But where's Charles' office? They must have moved him to another floor. No one was safe with pizza around him, anyway.

GSB. 7ai. 5:30. See you there.