Short Story

[Olga F.]

It all started so innocent. I was still in college and together with
my friends, Mike and Roger, had plans to open our own computer
software firm. Those were the best years when we were best friends and
full of bright ideas on how to develop the fastest software that would
be helpful and easy to use. Of course, we wanted our business to be
profitable at the same time, but we were less motivated by a big buck
than by the idea of creating something new and helpful. Roger was our
computer genius who was very good in writing computer software. Mike
and I were majoring in business and had ideas on how to make Roger’s
software appealing to a massive number of people. After graduating the
college all three of us decided to work together on realizing our
project about the firm. We scrambled some money together, and finally
we had it: we became three equal owners of the computer software firm.
Roger had this great idea for a new program that would me much faster
than the ones on the market, and now Mike and I had to come up with
ideas on how to sell it. We had some connections in the industry, and
the new program was well above competition, that very soon our
business started to prosper. It was nice in the beginning; we were
happy and enthusiastic about what we were doing, and our business
allowed us to make average income. We even hired couple more computer
programmers to help us grow. While Roger was writing new software,
Mike and I were busy with financial and legal part of the business.
Mike was very good in selling, the confidence and passion that he
talked about our business couldn’t leave anybody uninterested. The
firm started bringing some good money that we could allow a little
nicer car and could even buy a house. Roger and I started family. All
three of us became an average middle class American. I was happy the
way things were; we had five people in our firm, we made decent income
that allowed us to have all the necessities, we could afford to take
some vacations with our families, and could even put some of the money
in our savings accounts. Mike made friends with some stock brokers and
decided to go public and have public offering for stocks. We were
doing well; we hired more people, our software was ordered from all
over the world, and the value of our stocks was rising rapidly. Now we
were worth several million dollars. Now we could afford almost
anything: the most expensive car, a yacht, and luxury vacations. And
we did, because it was like a drug, the more you try, the more you get
addicted to it. Only Roger was not approving our fancy lifestyle, but
all his life he wasn’t interested in anything else except his
computers. Mike and I though continued living large. We got so much
into luxurious way if living that we failed to foresee the rising
competition. Soon, we didn’t have that many orders as we used to and
our stocks started to fall. The thought of coming back to a regular
lifestyle was unacceptable for Mike and me, because we got so blinded
by the power of money. We made a plan that would allow us to continue
to live the way we were. We decide to falsify our income records so
the value of our stocks would stay high. Roger would never have found
out the truth because he never dealt with the financial part of the
business. And with time he could come up with some software that would
blow everybody away, and our business would be back on track. It
sounded much better than it turned out. The time passed by and we
still were behind our competitors. Mike and I were getting deeper and
deeper in our lies, but we still couldn’t quit our wasteful spending;
only now we were spending the money of our shareholders. We were
getting paranoid and frustrated and this affected my relationships
with Roger and my family. My wife told me that she could no longer
recognize me and that I started treating her like I owed her. She
accused me in cheating and spending money on other women, and she was
right, so she left me. Mike and I started pressuring Roger and often
yelling at him to make new and better software. We were treating him
as if we were his bosses, or as if he was our slave. He couldn’t stand
that any more, said that our friendship was over and decided to leave
the firm taking his share. This is when it all revealed that our firm
was worth nothing and we even owed to our shareholders. Our bubble of
lie and luxury burst into pieces. Now Mike and I face some charges, we
have no money, no family, and no friends.