St. John had taken to moping around and losing interest in just about everything. It was his personal life that was dragging him down. At one point in one of our many interviews he stated, “Had I not had the personal issues, I probably would have been on for another ten years of warfare. I lived for that stuff.”
One of St. John’s friends at Microsoft was Ken Fowles—one of the people who had originally interviewed him during his hiring loop. Fowles had become in some ways a mentor for St. John. One thing they had in common was their shared disdain for the Microsoft millionaires and their banana yellow or lime green Ferraris. Fowles rode a Harley—a loud Harley—and one of his favorite things was to drive it through the parking garage around 10am, after the parking lot was full of those Ferraris straddling two parking spaces because god forbid somebody might scratch the door, and set off all the car alarms. “Of course, the nerds got upset,” says St. John. “They’d rush down to see if anything had happened to their precious car, and they’d bitch, bitch, bitch in email, and Ken loved every minute of it.”
What St. John needed was a change of perspective, and he was about to get just that. One day Fowles came to visit, determined to pull him out of his depression. “I don’t want to do anything,” said St. John. “Just leave me alone.” But Fowles didn’t give in. He essentially dragged St. John to the local Harley dealership and told him, “Alex, we’re going to cheer you up. I’m sick of this. You’re pathetic. Now pick a Harley.” But St. John said, “I don’t want to ride a motorcycle. They’re expensive…” At $21,000, they seemed like an expensive toy to St. John. And Fowles said, “Alex. Look at this dealership. How many of these bikes can you buy?” And that’s when it dawned on him. With his stock options, he could buy the entire inventory of the store. At 28 years old, he was a millionaire. And he ended up “very badly wobbling off the lot” on his very own crimson red Harley Ultra Glide.
After the usual spills and embarrassment, St. John became familiar with his new toy and got his Class C license, just in time for Fowles to invite him to join him, along with Viktor Grabner, on their annual ride to Sturgis, North Dakota for the great convergence of bike enthusiasts from all over. The hysterical details of this ride can be found on St. John’s blog at http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/04/24/sturgis/.
Hummer Time
Now that he freely acknowledged and embraced his millionaire status, St. John knew that he needed a prestige car, just like the others. “At Microsoft in that era, everybody was getting rich. All these kids out of college could barely wipe their own asses, and they were getting Microsoft stock options and becoming millionaires. The campus had thousands of them when I arrived in 1992. And there was a funny pattern to what these kids would do, people who had gotten insta-rich—all the kind of dumb mistakes they made with their finances… and one of the common things if you were a college nerd, never had any interests, you’re antisocial, you can’t make eye contact, and you’ve got a million bucks… What do you do? You go out and buy either a lime green or banana yellow Ferrari. That’s the first thing you have to do. And you park that, and it’s the most precious thing you’ve ever owned, and you park it as prominently as you can in the Microsoft parking lot after you come roaring into campus every day, and you straddle two parking spaces because you don’t want anybody to park near you to scratch your precious new lime green Ferrari.
“And so you’d arrive at work at Microsoft and you’d see these cars scattered around the campus, and you just go, ‘Oh god. I hate these guys.’ I hate these guys not only because they’re lucky enough to be millionaires at a young age, probably through no real productive contribution of their own, but they think that the cool way to express their success is to buy a lime green Ferrari and park it in public and straddle two parking spots.”
The stories of Microsoft’s early displays of wealth reminded Don Coyner, who had worked in marketing at Nintendo, of a time when Nintendo of America’s president Minoru Arakawa visited Atari at its height. “He said, ‘They are going to fail.’ And that was at a point when they were doing relatively well. And I asked, ‘Why do you think that?’ And he said, ‘Because their parking lot is full of really nice cars, and that tells me that their management team has lost focus.’ They were enjoying their money more than they were focused on building their business. Just a little insight like that. He’s just such a simple man in some ways, and he would say something like that, and you’d go ‘Holy crap! That’s really insightful.’” Whether Microsoft was destined to fail was obviously not an issue at the time, but sudden wealth did have its effect on the culture and performance of the company. More on that later.
Clearly, St. John’s prestige car could not possibly be a Ferrari or lime green. It had to be something else—something offensive, if possible. As fate would have it, somebody in the porting lab said to him one day, “Alex, you should buy a Hummer. That’s you. You’re a frickin’ bear. If you’re going to buy a ridiculous car to signal your entry into the Microsoft millionaire club, then you should buy a Humvee.” And, as he observes in his blog, since he needed to become more familiar with the Internet anyway—the newest, hottest thing at Microsoft next to lime green or banana yellow Ferraris—he might as well use it to look up the car mentioned. And it was the perfect anti-Ferrari. Huge. Bulky. Rugged. Expensive.
St. John was all in. He found a dealer online, examined the paint options and chose a crimson Hummer to match his Harley. He arranged to have it delivered to the Microsoft campus so everyone would see it and be impressed. His intended message was, “Fuck you and your lime green Ferraris.”
And the day came when a big tractor trailer loaded with Humvees drove into Microsoft’s campus and dropped off St. John’s grape-colored Hummer. Yes, because there was no color correction on his monitor at the time, his carefully chosen crimson Hummer was actually a garish purple. And everybody who saw it assumed that he had ordered such an outlandish color just to mock them—which wasn’t so far off the mark—and St. John decided that it was better to own the color purple than to own up to his foolish mistake… which is how he became the proud and unabashed owner of the purple beast. “I had to fabricate an entire fiction about why I’d pick a purple Hummer, just to show my contempt for the world, when really it was a complete failed effort to be cool, and to express my contempt for everybody with a properly colored crimson Hum-V.”
Following Fowles’ tradition of harassment, St. John took to wedging his Hummer a half an inch from the driver’s door of a random Ferrari parked in two spots. Moreover, he made sure that his vehicle was as dirty as possible. “I’d drive onto campus dragging tree branches and swamp grass on the back. If it wasn’t dripping gunk all over the parking lot right next to one of those Ferraris, I wasn’t happy.” He admits to being obnoxious and immature but adds, “That’s the way we were making technology, too. In many respects, it’s the same behavior that was taking place in the politics of Microsoft to get these technologies made.”
Defacing SeaTac
St. John was almost literally hell on wheels now that he had the Hummer. For instance, the Hummer’s tires could be automatically inflated or deflated to conform to road conditions, which had the side effect of increasing or decreasing the overall height of the car. St. John discovered the effect of this when he managed to tear down a “Maximum Height 6”5” warning sign in a Microsoft garage with his tires fully inflated. He also describes “that huge divot just above the right parking gate entrance” at Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport as being his doing. “I got that Hummer so badly wedged in there trying to catch a flight that I had to let the air out of all four tires to get unstuck. When I returned from that trip I had forgotten where I had parked the vehicle and ended up having to report it stolen to airport security.”
St. John got a ride from a highly amused female cop who had arrived at 2am to take his stolen vehicle report. “We finally located it on the very top floor in a distant corner of the garage, which spiked my memory that after wedging the vehicle in the garage entrance, unable to reverse out of the parking garage I had been compelled to try to drive it on its rims up the spiral ramp to another floor but the only floor I could get off on was the roof, which was also the only level where I could turn around to drive back down. I had parked the vehicle in a relatively hidden corner in the hope that the mangled roof rack covered with crushed concrete wouldn’t get linked to the new divot in the garage entrance and result in the impounding of my vehicle before I could get back from my trip and try to make good over the whole thing. By the time I got back I’d forgotten the whole incident. The cop found this all very entertaining and sent me on my way with her phone number.”
In fact, the purple Hummer was such a cop magnet that St. John was often pulled over on made-up pretexts just so the cops could check it out. “It certainly wasn’t for speeding,” he adds. “I think that Hummer was able to accelerate to 60mph in four or five minutes.”
Baptizing the Hummer
Word of the Hummer had gotten around, and a lot of people wanted to see it, or even better, to ride in it. Like a group of Intel executives who St. John was hitting up to sponsor one of his upcoming events. When he drove down the road from Microsoft to Intel and arrived in his purple Hummer, the executives asked for a ride, and St. John was only too happy to oblige… as long as he got his money.
So he piled these Intel executives, whom he describes as “responsible guys who actually wore suits to work and so forth,” into the Hummer and off they went down the road. But it was a straight, boring road. They were all excited. “Wow. We’re in a Hummer.” But to St. John, driving down a straight road was not the Hummer experience—you had to do something “off-roady,” so on a whim he veered off the road into a grassy park, thinking, “I’ve got to give them a shock and a bumpy ride. Something to remember. I’m going to take them off-roading in this park.” The park was freshly mowed, so the tall grass was lying flat over everything, including a small stream that was all but invisible to the driver of the hurdling and bouncing Hummer. “The Hummer went nose first, straight into a swamp. Just right through the grass. There was no ground there… Embedded there with water about halfway up the driver’s side window.”
The Hummer was stuck at a 45-degree angle, nose first in the water. There were no wheels touching the ground. No way out. This Hummer was bulletproof and waterproof, and it had a snorkel extension that could keep the engine running even when submerged. But none of that mattered. They were stuck, and the water seemed to be rising… or they were sinking.
Meanwhile, people—Microsoft people—were leaving work, and a traffic jam had begun to form as people gawked at the ungainly purple Hummer nose down in the muck. In the back were freaked out Intel execs thinking they were all going to drown. It was not St. John’s finest hour. Then two Redmond bicycle cops arrived. “They’re riding their bikes, wearing their little latex stuff and their little goofy helmets, and they come pedaling up.” St. John remembers lowering the window a little while the cops got as close as they could, leaning in and asking, “Sir. Are you in trouble?” “Uh yeah. I’m in trouble. We’re stuck in the swamp.” “Well. Is this a Hummer?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Can we get in?”
“Are you kidding? Can you get us out?”
“Oh yeah.”
By this time the Intel executives had lapsed into a panic at being confined in this sinking purple monstrosity, and the cops managed to get them out through the back door, following which, they climbed inside and began admiring the car and asking all kinds of questions while St. John is thinking, They’re going to cuff me and drag me off to jail, and I deserve it. I’m such an idiot. And so, to get things moving, he asked if they needed to see his driver’s license and insurance, or anything. “And they’re like, ’Sure,’ and they kind of glance at it and toss it back at me without writing anything down, and I go, ‘You know this is sinking. I’m not sure this is safe to stay in.’ And they go, ‘Yeah, we called a tow truck. It’ll be here in a minute. We’ll get you out of here.’
The cops were having a great time with the Hummer and even when St. John admitted to driving intentionally off the road into this parkland, they didn’t ticket him. Nothing. They just wanted a picture with him next to the purple Hummer while traffic was backed up as far as the eye could see.
When the first tow truck was too small to handle the Hummer, a larger one was called in. And all the while, St. John’s co-workers from Microsoft are very slowly passing by, gawking at his vehicle covered in grass and mud and goo. “And of course there’s nothing but this line of Microsoft people. Every one of them knows who I am, and I had to do the drive of shame with my dripping mud-covered Hummer down this huge line of cars with everybody I’ve had stuck in traffic for 45 minutes because I drove the thing into the swamp. And of course, the Intel people, they never spoke to me again, but they sponsored the event. So mission accomplished.” Mission accomplished as only St. John could have done it.