Here again I found myself joining forces with Bruce Berkoff, from back in the SuperMac days. Since I had worked with his then-girlfriend and eventual-fiance Irene, I managed to stay in touch with him for the two years that had elapsed. He presented me with this deal and I took it.

It seems that there is a company called SCM Microsystems GmbH near Munich, Germany that is known the world over for their PCMCIA adaptors for desktop machines (Intel-based Windows machines, anyway). They had recently purchased a micro-company in La Ciotat, France (on the south coast) that was working on a state-of-the-art PCMCIA SmartCard interface card. It seemed like a nice, cutting-edge technology situation, so I joined Bruce in the Marketing department (the whole company was only about 200 people I think, and only 14 or so in Los Gatos where we were to be located, in the US Sales office).

Well, let me say this and get it out of the way. A German-owned French company is not the most friendly situation to be in, so right off the bat, it was clear that dealing with the three nodes of the company was going to be a challenge. One that proved to be insurmountable, in fact. But I took it upon myself to attempt to bolster international communication through email, and it almost worked. Not really.

SCM Microsystems was billing itself as an Internet Company, since it was to bridge the desktop computer with internet commerce applications, especially Netscape Navigator. Unfortunately, no part of SCM Microsystems was connected to the internet, and the businessmen (a term I use loosely indeed) running the place had no experience with internet connectivity at all. They just wanted to buzz words. When it took four international phone calls, three faxes, and three email attempts to a French employee's personal Compuserve account to get a piece of information to France electronically, the management still didn't believe that there were problems. I threw my hands up.

The cool part was that I got to spend my second week at the company in the South of France. Unfortunately, I worked the whole, time, if one could possibly call it that. The engineers there were French (sorry, but its all true), and they did not have enough desk space or chairs for me and another guy (Andy Wolf from East Germany) to get anything done that week. But it was an experience nonetheless.

After four long months of steadily-sucking non-excitement, I had had enough. We had begun some attempted dealings with Netscape at that point, and I remembered that my good college friend David Karlton worked there. I looked him up and even went to visit him a couple of times. I sent him my resume, and in record time an interview was setup. It seems that the group he was in, Security, was in need of a person to fill his shoes when he moved to the Java group, and my work with SmartCards was the ticket to get me in the door.

I should point out that everyone in the office (my direct manager included) knew that I was leaving SCM Microsystems long before the VP and Acting GM of the company did. He had quite a bit of egg on his face when that news broke, and he immediately called me into his office with a "So do you have something to tell me?" heaving out of his balding, flush-red head. Small rewards are what we should always look for, I say.