Why does another Mass times site exist? Read my story →
I signed up for a wedding fair to sell people thousand-year archival storage. I prepared for an engineering debate. Nobody asked. They were there to pick a DJ.
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I was on the playground at St. Isidore during Faith Formation pickup. The idea of permanence floated up while the kids played tag around the structure. I was thinking about backups. Hard drives, cloud, cold storage. The weird emotional problem of files.
The ambulance had been a few years back. The Tacoma, the red Mini Cooper, the heart doing something it wasn't supposed to do. Long enough that I'd stopped flinching at the memory. Not long enough that I'd let it go. And there were things after the ambulance I still haven't found words for.
Registration for a popular Bay Area wedding fair was almost closed. I called the number, negotiated a discount, put down a deposit. One month out.
My instinct was to build the most defensible architecture. Archival-grade media, with Barry Lunt's blessing. Department of Defense accelerated aging tests. Library of Congress standards. I read continuously. I printed packs of documents with answers to questions nobody had asked. 3D-printed metal cases. Polycarbonate failure modes over a thousand-year window. I was getting ready for a fight and I knew I would win.
Then I worked on the rest of it.
The starter tier was a hundred and twenty-nine dollars. I printed packets with the company logo, a silhouette of a couple walking into the distance, the words Let's make it last forever. Inside: a USB drive, a Dropbox fallback link, a pre-stamped mail-back envelope. I had not bought pre-stamped postage since my teenage eBay dealer days. I weighed an envelope on the kitchen scale. I mailed one to myself to test the loop. It came back.
I burned sample discs of the things that mattered. My mother-in-law's memories. My father-in-law's VHS tapes. My writing. For the centerpiece, a clear acrylic cube on a black base. Inside, my own wedding disc on a small stand, like a ring in a jeweler's case.
Operations: tested. Marketing: exquisite. Engineering? C'mon now.
Jenina knew I was stressed. She took me to Michael's. She picked the flowers, tall pampas grass, peach-and-cream blooms, dried filler, sunflowers. I do not know what any of them are called. She arranged them into two vases and set a small purple LED at the base of each so they glowed from underneath.
Her arrangements were going to be the only thing anyone complimented. I did not know that yet.
We drove into the city and parked a few blocks from the hotel. It was cold. I had the sport cart with the long lever handle, the one we use for Costco trips and the kids' baseball and soccer. We loaded it, the roll-up banner, the acrylic cube, the packets, the sample cases, a coil of warm-white string lights, her two vases padded with a sweater. I pushed. She guided.
Strangers walked past us the way strangers walk past anything in San Francisco, which is to say barely looking. But I sure felt self-conscious. It was a strange way to be in the city. No messenger bag, no rushing to an office. Just a man with a cart and a sign about forever.
And Jenina was with me, which hadn't happened in the city since before the kids. We used to come down here all the time. Drinks, clubs, late dinners. Not in years.
Somewhere on the hill she asked what she should do at the booth. I said just look pretty. Half flirty, half I-don't-know-what. She did not laugh. I heard it leave my mouth and I heard, a half-second behind it, a CEO I used to work with talking about booth babes at a tech conference.
Dammit, Mike.
We kept pushing.
Inside, the room recognized itself before I did. Folding tables draped in cloth. Brides in not-wedding outfits, looking around the way you look around at a carnival. The last time we were in a room like this we were the customers, shopping for our own wedding. Now we were on the other side of the table.
I set up. Banner up. Cube centered. Packets stacked. Sample cases fanned out. Warm-white lights threaded around the back. Jenina's arrangements at the front corners, catching the eye of everyone who walked by.
The guy at the booth next to us was a musician, playing the event between sets. He asked what instrument I played. I told him I used to play the sax. Those were my people once, in my twenties, smoking, listening to beats while they jammed. I probably wish I were one.
The guy at the booth on the other side was selling suits. He had slicked-back hair and a suit too nice for the room, and he talked like you must be qualified to put down a deposit. He looked like a Gavin Newsom variant who got pruned and forced to work retail.
And then there was us. Engineer trying to sell permanence, behind a sign that said Let's make it last forever. Two people who'd been married long enough to be at their kids' Faith Formation pickup. Smiling. Matching. The visible part of the product. Couples drifted past and looked at us, and looked at the banner, and looked back at us, and you could see them doing the math without doing it.
We were the ad.
The funny part was the rest of the room. Twenty-somethings on Thursday dates, learning the names of bands they'd hire, surprised they needed a custom monogram and surprised again that they needed permanent memory and surprised again about something three booths over. They were just starting. We were years in. I watched them the way you watch people who don't know yet. They were buying forever like it was the monogram or the DJ, one more thing the wedding apparently needed. They didn't know how heavy that word gets. It was printed right behind me.
I did my pitch. I had a snap-the-old-disc demo with a DVD-R from our actual wedding videographer to show how fragile the standard stuff is. I made it dramatic. I added a pause that wasn't there at the start of the night and was there by the middle. The frat-boy-at-rush voice came back. The handwaving, the eye contact, the let me show you something. I refined as I went. I was getting comfortable.
About twenty minutes in I understood the room. Nobody was going to question the technology. Nobody asked about archival aging or polycarbonate substrates or the Department of Defense. There is no engineering debate. The couples were floating like they were on a date, which they were. They were the opposite of skeptical. If I was behind a booth, I belonged behind a booth. The credibility I had spent a month assembling was free at the door.
So I kept gathering names and emails and tried to figure out what I was actually doing.
The pitch was working, in the small way pitches work when nobody's saying no. That was the problem. This is too expensive a way to get market signal. A month of nights and a booth fee for a list of emails I could have gotten with a fifty-dollar ad. And it's not a venture play either. Nobody in this room is truly enthused, or nervous about losing anything. To get them there I'd have to drive some kind of fear. I was already slipping into it. I don't feel comfortable doing that either. This isn't the glamorous play and it isn't the disciplined one. It's a guy who almost died once putting on a tax ID and printing a banner because he was scared his kids wouldn't have anything when he was gone.
I don't actually know if I care about other people's memories or if I'm just paying down some guilt about my own.
As the night went on, I was just looking forward to what we could eat in the city.
We packed up. Discs back in cases. Banner rolled. Lights coiled. Flowers into the cart, padded again with the sweater.
As we pushed the cart out, the suit guy was loading his stuff into the trunk of a small red Kia. Not exactly what I'd assigned him.
We picked a French restaurant a few blocks away. We walked in and the room was almost empty. One waiter. Two tables.
The other table was a group of women. One of them kept mentioning her husband's private jet, where he was, dot dot dot, the kind of detail dropped a little louder than the rest of a sentence. I had just stumbled through a market test in a room full of beginnings, and the only other guests in the restaurant were narrating the life I hadn't lived.
The waiter chose our table. He didn't like the other one either. He just stood with us and talked about random things. I usually work to belong in rooms like this. Tonight I didn't have to.
That night, we held hands at the table. We held hands when we walked to the restaurant. I remember how her hand felt over the years. We hold hands when the kids are not around. We hold hands just before we fall asleep, before they get too sweaty. We hold hands when it's just us two.
We're still here.
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