There is no such thing as an unfinished beer in East Oakland. The area deemed "Little Mexico" by some, plays host to more taco trucks than police cars.
The entire stratum of society is dependent upon that which proceeds it, here.
If you set down a half full can of Guiness for more than 5 minutes, it will no longer be half full.

Al was an unfinished beer drinker. The dude before would sometimes leave 6 ounces or more of beer on so mouch as a street corner.

This was Al's biggest reward for a lifetime building our massive global network of communication.

Al worked for the Phone company for 14 years. Eventually, Pacbell felt comfortable having Al work on switches at the CO.Al is a very smart nigger. He crawled under houses. He carried 2-pair tied around his ankle. It was the worst part of the job.

Today, you pay $17.95 a month for access to the world via that 2-pair. Al gets paid nothing.

One lady Al worked with crawled under houses too. She slid under a suburban home in 1973 without a flashlight. She found what she thought was a piece of plumbing. She shouted at Al to hand her a spotlight, so she could see how to get around this pipe.

Al funneled the light down to her using a small pully atatched to the Lady's leg.

The light flickered back and forth behind her, sending shadows across a ceiling of rotted plaster, caked with pink insulator and refuse. A sickly sweet scent filled the air as the intense light burned the goo to an epoxy-like plasticitude.


The Lady's hand lept upwards searching for reality; a place to latch onto to escape the fear. But the lamp only betrayed Her, for when it came to rest, the pale yellow light fell upon a desicated corpse. Only now did it begin to shudder and spit forth grey dust. The soft bursting sound of a summer heated corpse stuffed behind a wall as if lost in some Edgar Allen Poe work.

When it came to rest, she had been coated in a thin white mist of death: not to mention life-long trauma.



Al and the Lady built our network for us. Al was homeless. When Ma Bell became the baby bells in 1984, Al lost his job. For 14 years he worked for the man. The man never took care of him. In 1992, Al lost his house in San Francisco because the off-ramp for 101 was being rebuilt where his house was. He moved to Oakland but was quickly evicted because he no longer had a job and was fighting a crack addiction. He began to finish other people's beers.
Can you blame him for wanting crack? Painful, yes, but not as painful as reality.

Al was arrested for posession of a controled substance. He did 5 years. While in prison, Al lost his left eye in a fight. He wasn't allowed access to a computer. He was taught to do carpentry in the form of cabinets. The cabinets were sold to various government orgaizations; they were the cheapest bidders. Al was paid $0.50 an hour. He got one phone call a month. He never got to see what kind of phone switch the prison was using.

Today, We have the phone that Al used to make his calls from prison.
It's a pay-phone. It takes quarters. In addition, the calls could be billed to the calling party via a locally owned and run phone company. That phone company was squeezed by Pacific Bell. Ownership was moot. Control was everthing.

That small phone company disintigrated and took down the contractors that installed the phones. They weren't paid. The phones stayed in private hands, a distinctly illegal proposition. One of those individuals donated his phone to us. Now We have it.

And now we have Al. Al finished Our beer.

The key difference is that We let Al choose the beer.

Soon Al will be Cisco Certified.