The Gargoyle

Once upon a time in a 50-story condo in Seattle, Washington...

Picture this: I was a fresh-faced 21-year-old, a computer science student in Seattle at the University of Washington. Hard to imagine, given my present-day appearance as a grizzled and worldly father figure, but hear me out. Once upon a time, I was a 6’2” 165lb programmer boy.

I came across a post on the UW subreddit. It had no upvotes but the title intrigued me. It read “Looking for networking experts for small business.” The poster continued: “Looking for someone to help configure some small business networking equipment in Seattle! DM if interested.” I found this unusual. Why post for networking help on /r/udub? Sure, it’s a well-known CS school, but configuring enterprise networking equipment isn’t really a mainstay on the curriculum. Even then, the best you’re going to get are students? Surely as a small business with expensive equipment, you could do better than a random student from reddit?

Nevertheless, I did know a thing or two about networking, and no doubt, as a newly minted homeowner (whole other-ass story right there) I could use a couple extra bucks. I hit him up.

We exchange emails. His name is Nick. Nick Bhandari.¹ His email address is from some kind of finance company. Mortgage securities trading? Don’t have a clue what that is but it sounds moneyed. We arrange a phone call. On the phone you can tell this guy’s amped 24/7. I’ve never heard small-business networking gear discussed with such enthusiasm. His business has a bunch of expensive gear that they need set up. Again, how they can afford this gear and not someone better than a student to configure it is something I don’t understand, but whatever, I’m not about to talk myself out of a paycheck.

Finally we arrange to meet up so I can do the job. He gives me an address. It’s a condo downtown. Odd place for a business, certainly an odd place for rack-and-stack Ubiquiti gear. But whatever, I’m not about to talk myself out of a paycheck.

I arrive, he greets me at the gate. This dude is the frattiest US-born Indian man you’ve ever seen. Harvard baseball cap, matching baggy gym shorts, sandals. Lives in a two-bedroom condo near the top of a 50 story building. He looks like an Indian version of Handsome Squidward. Basically he’s locked in.

Nick Bhandari. I thought this portrait would be exaggerated for comedic effect, but after drawing it there’s no mistake: that’s exactly what he looks like.

I come to find the man is a Harvard grad, co-founded a finance company in NYC and recently moved to Seattle. He’s got a wife whose main occupation is running a yoga-inspo Instagram account and looks kinda like if Kim Kardashian was skinnier.

In the center of his living room is a huge cast-iron sphere. It has a protrusion around the top and a small window on the side, as if a small soot-covered Victorian boy is supposed to clamber in the top and perch inside doing some back-breaking Dickensian slave job. I don’t ask what it’s for, but it occupies so much space that every conversation has to happen around it. Its size and sheer presence make it almost feel like an animate member of the conversation, although it never says much. Nick appears to be used to this.

I quickly get to chatting about what needs to be done and what I’m going to charge him. He says its gonna be a business expense since he’s working from home and apparently he needs "the best internet" because he’s trading stocks I guess? Turns out he’s paying for two internet connections and he wants to "merge them" which isn’t really how it works but whatever, I’m not about to talk myself out of a paycheck.²

Since he clearly looks mega rich I shoot for the moon and say "OK how’s $80/hr sound?" He puts himself into the "thinking" pose for about a half second then says "OK I can do that." Score. Big money at this point in my career.

So I get to work. At some point I screw something up and mutter “fuck,” and from the other room Nick bellows “THAT'S WHAT I LIKE TO HEAR.” I look up completely speechless and he continues: “this is why I moved here, bro!!” I continue to be speechless. “In New York when I have IT guys come over they just send these tight-nutted dudes in polos. When you fuck up, you just want to say FUCK! You can’t get that in New York.” An insightful man indeed.

Ultimately, modulo an additional router that’s in transit, I get his stock-trading franken-network configured and he asks me, “Can I keep you on retainer to just come over once a month and make sure everything’s working and updated and all that?" I think this stuff is unlikely to stop working on its own but whatever, I’m not about to talk myself out of a paycheck. That’s how, I figured, I set myself up to get paid a couple hundred bucks a month to be this local millionaire’s personal IT buttboy.

Fast forward a week later. Nick calls me up, router’s here. Great, I’m heading over. He doesn’t greet me at the gate this time, I just go up to his condo and knock.

His wife answers. She looks a little winded, cheeks slightly flush. “Hey Simon! Glad you’re here. Nick and I need your help with something.” I say something oblivious like "that's why I'm here haha" and she says "no, something else. Nick's not equipped to handle this."

Now, there's enough innuendo in those words alone, but combined with her appearance I’m a little bit alarmed. I don’t have much time to process this because she leads me around the corner the other way. To the bedroom. I'm on red alert panicking inside as I’m suddenly forced to imagine myself in a forced three-way with Big Nick and his wife Skinny Kim. We enter the room and I see no sign of Nick. But I do see an older Indian couple, who I later come to find are Nick’s parents, and a tall, muscled white guy who I later come to find is Nick’s workout buddy. Everyone is huffing, exhausted, red in the face. The mattress is limply flopped off the bed halfway. I can only describe the experience as a total shutdown of my limbic system.

Immediately my lizard brain puts two and two together. This whole thing is just a ruse. These sick individuals prey on UW boys for sexual conquest. I’m just the latest in a long line of skinny college students who are doomed to be pinned down and violated in every possible way. At the height of the action, Nick is going to drop down from the ceiling and post up on the ottoman like a gargoyle, stock still and rock hard, watching his entire family plus workout buddy defile my innocence forever.

If HR called me in, slid this across the desk and asked “Simon, what the fuck,” I think that would be the best day of my life

Of course, that doesn’t happen, because a moment later Nick bursts out of the bathroom. Flicking his hands dry he gestures at the mattress: “you would not believe how heavy this thing is dude.”

Recovering from my self-inflicted trauma I’m lost for words. He clarifies: “Horse hair. Best of the best they said. But god damn it's heavy."

I don’t know why. I didn’t ask. But he needs help flipping over his horsehair mattress. So having assembled the crack team of Nick, his wife, his parents, his workout buddy and me, who's getting paid $80/hr, with much straining, we manage to flip over the mattress.

Why the fuck am I telling you all this.

I’ve been said at times to have main character energy. I realized recently that didn’t just happen. The way this story started is by seeing a weird reddit post and following that rabbit hole. When I see something like that my brain goes “oh fuck, side quest” and smashes “accept” every time. I can’t help it. It turns out the world is full of side quests, and if you interact with them, they interact back. Compound this several times per week over a couple decades and that’s your recipe for Crazy Stories Guy.

If you set off for everything expecting a hero’s journey with crazy shenanigans and a life-altering payoff at the end, you’re going to be disappointed, because that happens pretty rarely. However, if you lower yourself down a bit and just spend time exploring every fractal thrown at you by the universe that you can, pretty soon you’re going to have a huge corpus of experiences like this that you can draw upon for wisdom. Or for telling at parties to make the girls laugh. Up to you.

1. Changed to protect the innocent, but not by that much.

2. You can do a load balance/round robin kind of deal with two connections (IPv4 only since you need NAT) which is what I set up for him, but while this can raise the total throughput to the total of both connections, any single stream has to take one route only and can’t go faster than the faster of your two connections. You obviously can’t improve latency either, which I think is what he was alluding to with the stock trading thing. Nowadays there are services like Speedify that can actually aggregate multple connections, but the way it works is by being a VPN service that does software-defined channel bonding/link aggregation over the internet, so your experience is gonna change a lot depending on whether or not they have a point-of-presence in your city and how good the routing is between you and them and between them and your destination. If you didn’t understand any of that, congratulations on getting laid.