two eighteen-wheelers embarked from Skokie for Pittsboro.
The manager of the Town of Pittsboro did not know how to grant a business license to a software company. He was a creative and flexible man, and after enough conversation we concurred that it would probably be okay if we were permitted to open under the category of “Small Appliance Repair.”
When the trucks arrived they blocked traffic in front of the Post Office, and I went on a hiring spree. I had space which was almost completed — we left the Mediterranean palm trees painted on the wall — I had truckloads of computers and source code and boxes of product, and I had phones that were ringing with the fifteen-year-old vanity phone number that I had insisted be included with the deal.
What I needed was staff. My sales manager, Steve, left my side in RTP and took up with BLAST. As did Tami. As did my brother Mark, who parachuted in from Canada. But I needed more help than that. Barbara patiently directed me to all available talent.
There was Doug, who was writing a chemistry textbook. He abandoned his academic pursuits and joined BLAST to write documentation. After all, writing is writing. There was Sam, who was running a snack truck. Shipping is shipping, after all. Snacks, software — just ship it out on time.
Leon ran the furniture store around the corner. His passion was for elaborate wooden models of transport trucks and fire engines, and he was a remarkable craftsman. I’m not sure how healthy the furniture market in Pittsboro was at the time, but he had hand trucks, and he had a son, Brian, who had a strong back and a good attitude toward work. Brian unloaded our eighteen-wheelers — as his civic duty to help clear traffic congestion — and hired on to work in technical support. Brian worked with us for over a decade before realizing his dream of becoming one of the first professional fire fighters hired by Chatham County.
Barbara found Barbara, a local accountant, who was frustrated by her endeavors for a local CPA and who was delighted to become the Chief Financial Officer of BLAST.
We were in business over night. The phones were ringing, and we were shipping product all over the planet from the heart of downtown Pittsboro. We joked that we didn’t need to lock our doors at night, since we only possessed a million dollars worth of computer gear. Had we been selling farm equipment, we would have needed a fence.
BLAST was a truly global business. It had distributors on every continent, and product installed in almost every country on earth. Faxes rolled in with orders from far away places, and BLAST delivered.
I was still donning a coat and tie and vanishing into my monster commute to RTP and the family business, when Tami started going to work in her blue jeans. She did need to pick up her dry cleaning before her trips to Paris, or Milan, or Mexico City, but she found her Pittsboro days could be spent in her casual clothes.
“None of our customers come to Pittsboro,” she said. “They’ll never see us dressed this way.”
In no time the company lost its business attire, at which point I was instantly jealous.
I watched my colleagues moving on to more meaningful employment, where they could wear what they wanted to wear, and be who they wanted to be. With leftover palm trees on the wall, an expansive deck out back, and a ping-pong table in the basement, they went to work on shipping product.
Tami and I shared a humble farmhouse in the woods, which somehow got electricity and running water shortly after her arrival, but our conduit for communication was through Lisa, our travel agent.
Lisa would say, “You are going to be in Portland, and Tami is going to be in San Francisco for the weekend — would you like me to get you together?” Although Tami had left the family business in favor of small town software, she was still very much on the global stage.
At is peak, BLAST was running a nineteen person payroll, including Dennis Kikendall and Will Raymond, arguably the greatest minds in communication software in the area. We successfully shifted the trajectory of its descent into the Dumpster, and along the way we buried all of its corporate debt, and assembled a pile of cash. My gamble that there would be plenty of talent in the woods paid off handsomely. Many people were delighted to forgo higher salaries to work closer to home.
We had a blast at BLAST. And it introduced us to Pitts-boro, North Carolina, the community on the other end of the Pittsboro-Moncure Rd. upon which we live. Many of the hours I spent working for BLAST was in far away lands, on the floor of a trade show, or sharing exotic meals with distributors. I would pass through town on my way to and from work — always over dressed — but I was finally getting a chance to see things in the light of day.
I opened an account at the local hardware store — to buy the odds and ends necessary to maintain the business. Donnie and Joyce ran the place, and whenever I walked into the store in the early days, I did not look like the other patrons. Nonetheless, they came to accept me over time, and I found myself drawn to their wisdom and advice.
I opened a bank account on the corner, at a place that has never been able to comprehend foreign currency exchange. I moved all of my travel to the local travel agency two doors down from the bank. My introduction to Pittsboro was that of an absentee property owner, occasionally stopping by for meetings or to run errands on behalf of the property. With BLAST, we shifted from absentee members of the community, to identifiable merchants in its midst.
I occasionally went to lunch about town, and sometimes stopped in at Mimi’s General Store. She was selling a slim selection of organic vegetables and a whole bunch of health food supplements. Mimi and I became friends. She had been retailing in Pittsboro for many years, and I was the new guy with a software company.
On one occasion we were sitting on the front porch of my ramshackle home and Mimi was discussing a bold move. She was contemplating moving out of the ground floor of the Blair Hotel and into the abandoned car dealership next to the courthouse. More importantly, she was thinking about serving lunch.
I told her that the highly paid people of BLAST would pay a premium for organic lunches, and that the demographic shift in Pittsboro was under way.
Along the way we had befriended Clyde Jones, a legendary “outsider artist” who cuts “critters” out of cedar logs with his chain saw. We provided Clyde with rides, and cedar logs from our place, and he occasionally gave us a sculpture that he usually made on site.
One time I helped Clyde negotiate a royalty deal with the New Orleans Museum of Art. Clyde sat on one side of the kitchen table and listened to my phone conversation. I attempted to represent his best interests on my side of the table — taking visual cues from him. When we finished the deal, they emailed me a form to be signed, and I suggested to Clyde that we get him a copy for his records. To do that, we dropped in at BLAST.
At the time BLAST was right next door to the Post Office, and it boasted a long brick wall. As Clyde and I were entering the building, I suggested the wall was ugly, to which he agreed. We decided on a whim that if I were to get the wall painted blue, and provide some scaffolding, he would paint a mural on it.
Which we did. Tami rounded up school children, the local hardware store’s paint vendor donated the paint, and off we went.
The mural went up in fine fashion. Someone called the police, thinking it was a violation of the local sign ordinance, but when the chief of police came to inspect, he thought it looked fine to him.
I miscalculated the amount of media attention the project would receive. It seemed like every camera crew and newspaper in the state arrived to cover the famous Clyde Jones doing a mural, and BLAST failed to get a single mention.
Later
