I had a little script on my .bash_profile which computed the value of my RNWK options. It went up... up... up... half a milllion, a million, $1.5M!? I was think

I had a little script on my .bash_profile which computed the value of my RNWK options. It went up... up... up... half a milllion, a million, $1.5M!? I was thinking about retirement - at age 24, while making $65K/year! Then my imaginary fortune evaporated, all in a day or two, and that was that. (I have been skeptical of all non-salary-based compensation ever since.) I was fine; I could smell the layoffs coming, but I hated my job anyway, so I found a different job working on some non-internet-based software that was right up my alley, and that worked out well for many years after. At one point the following year I estimated that fully a third of my friends were out of work. Programmers mostly survived, but there were lots of designers, testers, and admins living on unemployment for a while. My wife lost her job, too, when her startup lost its funding; she went back to school.