During my freshman summer I took a job as an intern at a family friend's DC-area dot-com company. I learned about web programming and databases, and with the motley crew of 7 or 8 fulltime employees, indulged the founder's dreams of internet glory. Alan, a prolific but messy programmer, shat out millions of lines of code that no one else tracked or read. The servers quickly became littered with half-finished auction, mass mail, spot market, survey, bulletin board and other applications. Various business associations were lined up -- look, bakers! You can buy flour from each other! Look, asphalt manufacturers! You can share your thoughts on asphalt production! It's only 1998, and it's ALREADY THE FUTURE.

I came back the next summer, and the next. The staff swelled, then shrank, then shrank some more. Alan left. A room in the office was sublet to someone else, then all of the rooms but two. Then the office moved to the end of the metro. At no point did the underlying code change, except to be given a new coat of electronic paint. The same shitty technology -- now also hopelessly outdated -- was bundled together with tape and marketed to clueless and/or deeply corrupt foreign nationals passing through Washington with an eye toward blowing their country's economic development budget.

Now, every 8 or 12 months, I get urgent, ego-stroking phone calls asking me to fix things. There hasn't been an actual programmer on staff in several years. It's always something incredibly urgent, with a short timeframe -- having tried to sell the client on not really needing, say site search for the last couple of months, they've grown anxious.

I really hate being put in this position. He knows I'm grateful for being given a start, and that I know the systems, and that I'm available on the ad-hoc basis that lets him continue to limp along. I know I'm being taken advantage of, and it pisses me off. But how do you tell a family friend, kinda-smarmy though he may be, that it's long since time to flush his company down the toilet? That his technical assets are worthless, and he has no one on staff with knowledge of any technologies less than a decade old. They're still running Windows NT, for god's sake.

Sigh. I guess it's time to write a stern "ok, but this is really the last time" email. I'm such a goddamn sucker. Maybe if I refuse to take any money for it he'll get the message.