The head of the Career Development Office at Grinnell encouraged me to apply for a summer Noyce/Intel grant that would allow me to intern anywhere I wanted, so I spent the summer between sophomore and junior years (1996) at the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) in a suburb of Cleveland. NPTN was the parent organization of the Free-Net systems that allowed millions of people to go online before private Internet service providers were widely available.

I had no connections in Cleveland, so I rented a room in a retired lady's basement sight unseen -- she sent me the key in the mail since she would be out of town when I arrived -- and after a quick stop in Oklahoma to borrow Dad's car, I drove to Ohio. I got to the basement and found black mold covering the lower portion of the walls. No sweat, I drove to a store for Lysol and a brush and bucket, and before bedtime I had it scrubbed off. Sometimes I wonder if future health issues might have been avoided if I had left the key under the door and found somewhere more wholesome to stay.

The internship guidelines said I needed to send regular updates to my faculty sponsor, and I took that to mean daily, so I kept a daily journal and emailed it to him as well as my family. Unbeknownst to me, however, his mother died at the start of the summer, and he spent the whole summer in Wales without Internet access settling her estate. So I never heard from him even once until we both got back to campus.

I got to NPTN and found there had been a shake-up and all three of the upper management had abruptly left just a few days before. There were just two employees left and a temp receptionist. I didn't ask nosy questions; I just pitched in to do whatever was necessary, which turned out to be taking over all the logistics of configuring and shipping a dozen complete Free-Net systems to their target communities. Between that and my independent research project, I learned a lot! But here are some of the other lessons I learned...

• When an organization's founder and CEO commits a federal offense using his work computer, the FBI will freeze all the organization's bank accounts for the duration of the investigation. NPTN went bankrupt shortly after I left. The employees had been working without pay for months on the promise that they would be reimbursed when the accounts were unfrozen. I don't know whether that happened or not.
• During the investigation, the people who haven't fled have to be very cagey about the details. I didn't learn the full story until the summer was nearly over and the verdict was about to hit the newspapers. The receptionist was much more curious about the situation than I was and confided to me her questions, which seemed conspiratorial at the time but turned out to be absolutely on target.
• When both parties are in breach of contract, negotiation is everything. NPTN had contracted to buy a certain number of licenses for the software package that powered their servers, but they couldn't follow through for financial reasons. However, the software didn't do everything it was supposed to do, and the software company couldn't bring it up to spec. Looking through my journal notes, a lot of my time and my boss's was spent saying "We'll do what we promised if you'll do what you promised..."
• Commuting is stupid. It was a 20 minute drive from the basement I was renting to work, if I didn't hit rush hour. At rush hour it took twice as long, in stop-and-go traffic. I swore never to do it again, and so far I haven't had to.
• Suburban culture is not small town culture. There was a rainstorm one evening after a sweltering hot day, and when it passed the sun came out, and I walked around the block barefoot, which seemed perfectly natural to me. By the time I got back to the house, a neighbor had called my landlady to inform her that "your boy is walking down the street with no shoes on!" I hadn't met any of the neighbors ... I didn't know they even knew who I was.
• Being a white guy is sometimes a liability. One weekend I was at the downtown Cleveland library and decided to walk to the Case Western Reserve University library, which was much farther away than I thought. The walk took me through a solidly Black neighborhood, and the only place to stop to eat turned out to be run by the Nation of Islam, but I was so worn out that I didn't notice until after I'd ordered. They served me a fish sandwich that was all skin, but I was glad to have it.
• Perhaps most importantly, the slogan "Think globally, act locally" was already passé in 1996. The Free-Net systems I was building for the local affiliates were obsolete by the time they got them. We should have been focusing on building a single, Internet-based platform that any town could use, without needing their own hardware and dial-up lines. But that was not yet clear at the time.
• And finally, if writing a research paper is part of the internship, maybe start writing during the internship. I wound up shutting myself in the college library and working on it for two solid weeks before the summer ended. But the result was very worthwhile!