(a journey into Club Love)

I’m live on the web!

I turn around and wave at the digital camera.

I’m coming live from the broadcast control room of the next go-go startup in the Seattle high-tech scene, the Internet Entertainment Group. Behind their euphemistically-misleading name is a company that is unambiguously positioned at the intersection of two (fast-rising) bellwhether trends: internet stock greed and porn babe lust.

This control room is ten by ten and dimly lit, the better to monitor the six video feeds being piped in from adjoining theme-rooms, where the "content providers" are hard at work putting out product. In the Two Girl Shower, a blonde spread-eagles on the pink tile, massaging her shaved groin with the pulsating flow from the shower head, careful to avoid getting her hairdo wet. She’s half way through her eight hour shift. In the Couples Room, an African-American man buries his head in the crotch of an Asian American woman, who is laughing at something her partner has just said. Next door in the dungeon, a skinny brunette with the stage name of Destiny yells out to her boss, Mara Mehren, that she has to pee; in the broadcast booth, Mara inserts a videotape of Destiny’s dungeon performance from yesterday, which overrides the live webcast. Few viewers will notice. Destiny wraps herself in a white towel and dashes across the office and into the bathroom—disappearing only momentarily. With a click of the mouse, we can bring up her live image on the Pee Cam.

On almost all porn sites, photos are now free. They’re so commonplace that they’ve lost their commercial value. The new valuable commodity is privacy; voyeurs on the internet pay to retain it, diddling dick from their secluded home, and the exhibitionists are paid to give it up, rubbing nub for the live cameras.

At IEG, not even peeing is private.

I am here with the CEO of IEG, Seth Warshavsky. True to the internet mold, he’s a nerdy dropout millionaire, a mere 25 years old. His gray polo sweater and gray wool slacks bring out the premature gray in his short hair. He’s 5 feet 6, so back at the main office the big guy is known as "the little man." Why would any geek today want to be like Bill Gates when they could be like Seth Warshavsky? It’s the ultimate revenge of the nerds: not only does the nerd get the money and the fame, he’s got the girls too.

Seth and Mara are talking deadlines and schedules. Seth says to Mara, "Can we launch the dildo cam by next week?"

The Dildo Cam?

"It’s built around a dental appliance," Seth explains.

Porn sites are always early adopters of new technology, and the Dildo Cam is a perfect example. Mara reaches into a file drawer and pulls out the stainless steel instrument, a six-inch long prod with a glass eye at its tip and for a tail, a cable line ending in a video jack.

"We’ve hollowed out a latex dildo," Mara says, but she digs around some more in the file drawer and can’t find the sleeve. "Someone must have borrowed it."

My curiousity is far more primal than my disgust, and rather than ask if he has any shame I blurt out, "What’s it look like in there? Can you see anything?"

He shows me the headlight on the tip of the prong. He’s tried it on his girlfriend, boldy going where no man has gone before. He gets a little giddy telling me this, revealing a boyish charm. "First, you see the walls dripping, and a lot of undulating motion. Then, when it happens, there’s just an explosion."

An explosion? "Squirting from the walls. It’s amazing. You won’t believe it when we go online. It’s going to blow people away." He details his plans for a split screen display, a crotch shot paired side by side with the dildo cam, "to give the dildo shot some context."

Mara Mehren doesn’t object to Seth’s latest invention, but she would like to see gender equality in her workplace. She offers, "I think the guys in the Buddy Room should have to use something equally invasive."

"Maybe like a Butt Plug Cam?" Seth suggests.

"I was just kidding," Mara says, afraid of what she might have started.

Seth gets a playful grin on his face. "You know what I also wanted to go online with by next week? I want to install a live audio feed in this room, along with the video cam. That way, the men online can talk with you as well as watch you."

Mara’s face falls. "I think that’s a bad idea."

"Why not?" Seth asks. "You’re always saying how the customers are more interested in you than in the performers." Viewable on the Control Room Cam, Mara receives more chat messages than her girls do. This is the odd way our brain, that great erogenous organ, has responded to the ubiquity of sexual imagery in our culture: live performers are more titillating than photo archives, and clothed people like Mara are somehow more titillating than performers, who might be acting. What users are getting off on today is not how hardcore the sex is, but how real it is—even when it’s not sex.

Still, Mara’s not sold on the concept. "Seth, we use this room for business conversations. We need to have some privacy to talk. Not everything is appropriate for broadcast. The video camera is enough already." Mara sees that Seth has a big grin on his face. "Are you teasing me?" she asks. "You’re not really going to put a microphone in here, are you?"

Seth is deadpan. "I think it’s the next new thing. Come on, let’s do it." He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his long black wool overcoat.

Mara’s known him for six years, but she can’t tell if this is a ruse. "You wouldn’t do that to me, would you Seth?" Does she really think the guy who’s putting a camera inside a dildo is really going to hesitate putting a mere microphone in her office? Maybe he was kidding her to start, but he senses her discomfort, and I can see his mind working, wondering. This is a guy who’s made a bundle every time he’s put a camera in places that some people find objectionable, and the stronger Mara objects the more it makes him wonder if there’s money to be made here.

"No, Seth, please," Mara begs.

At last a big goofy smile breaks out Seth’s face.

"Wow, you really had me going there for a moment," Mara says, relieved. Then, a beat later: "You *were* kidding, right?"

There are over 10,000 porn sites on the internet, and they’ve all got naked people doing unimaginable acts, but only IEG has Seth Warshavsky at its helm. He’s got a go-getter mindset that the adult entertainment world has never seen before. Seth can beat your web site with his web site, and then he can take your web site and beat his web site. "Seth could sell electric forks," says his chief financial officer. In just a few years, Seth has built a diversified media empire. IEG owns over 100 internet porn sites outright, including its flagship ClubLove. He has some form of partnership or barter with 1,400 other sites. In addition, he supplies the webcasts of over 1,000 films to HustlerTV, Penthouse.com, and twenty other brand name sites.

How has he done it? While most sites just advertise with each other, fighting for a slice of the existing web traffic, Seth Warshavsky has a nose for controversy that gets his brand name into the mainstream. He’s been on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, he’s been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. With a fiery 27-year-old lawyer-sidekick who never backs down at legal intimidation, they’ve found legal ways to post nude photos of advice-columnist Dr. Laura Schlessinger taken by a man she was having an affair with during her 20s. They’ve videotaped reenactments of sexual performances by Jack Nicholson and Michael Jordan according to sworn testimony of prostitutes who’ve slept with the stars. Seth Warshavsky is most famous for having found a legal way to broadcast on the internet (and then later, sell in videostores) the Honeymoon tape of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson. It became the best selling adult video of all time, clearing 300,000 copies, the first ever porn video to be deemed what’s called in the trade a "crossover item."

Now Warshavsky is in for the controversy of his life, as he tries to turn his entire company into a "crossover item." He has announced that he will be betting his privately-held internet company on the skyrocket gamble of an initial public stock offering, putting his low-brow taste on a collision course with the blue-blood high-brow manners of investment banking. For the most part he is not welcome on Wall Street, which is trying to portray the internet as a nice, clean place to buy books and airline tickets. They have a vested interest in keeping the internet free of sleaze. But do they really think the guy who’s putting a live camera inside his employees’ vaginas is going to wince at listing his stock on NASDAQ? He wants to raise the money to acquire more sites and finance the transition to broadband webcasting. So far, just in making his announcement, he’s got the media squirming.

When it happens, expect an explosion.

In 1998 the U.S. pornography market was just over $8 billion. The only thing that kept it from being bigger was the limiting factor of shame: the embarassment of stepping behind the curtain at the video store or standing at the magazine rack. The internet, though, eliminates the shame factor. While the circulation of Playboy magazine is down to 2 million copies monthly from a high of 8 million, online porn sales grew 40% last year alone, to just under $1 billion. In 1998 IEG’s share was $46 million in revenues and a fat $14 million in profits.

Those kind of numbers from an internet company usually entice the top-rung investment banks to line up for what’s called a "Bake-Off," hoping to be chosen as the lead underwriter. But the Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanleys of i-banking are afraid of a backlash from associating with IEG, not wanting a cum stain on their suits—a stance that is truly hypocritical, IEG’s Director of Business Development Michael Cozad is quick to point out. "30% of the searches on Yahoo have the word ‘sex’ in the search string. And America Online, which makes so much money off the sex talk in its chat rooms, has taken the hypocritically pro-family stance of refusing to accept banner ads for sex sites in its chat rooms."

While the bankers and the media fear Seth Warshavsky is going to make pornography more accessible to children, the real culprits are search directories like Yahoo, which provide links to hundreds of free porn sites without verifying the user’s age. "What we’d really like to see," says Michael Cozad, "is a site like Yahoo verify age (with a credit card) before providing those links." Then, he says, he would advertise on Yahoo. "As it is now, advertising on Yahoo’s sex-links page is worthless, because the traffic is all kids. We just get millions of kids who click through to the front page of our site but can’t sign up because they’re underage." IEG’s sites don’t let anybody in without age verification.

So the reality is that Seth Warshavsky doesn’t want to pollute the web, he wants to make it legitimate. In February of 1998 he proposed to the Senate Committee on Commerce an ".adult" domain-name extension of the web, cordoning off all sexually explicit material to an age-verified segment. If he can legitimize the market, he can remove some of the stigma/shame, which is the only real obstacle to his company’s growth.

Despite being scorned by the top-rung banks, Seth has had plenty of interest from lesser-known institutions like National Securities, which took the Seattle-based search directory Go2Net public in 1997. Go2Net proved that an internet stock can move from the over-the-counter boonies to NASDAQ, laying the foundation for IEG to follow. There are six publicly-traded sex stocks (stock symbols GRLZ, MGMA, SPZE, RICK, MLDS and PRVT), but only the last in that list has a strong internet presence, and it’s a Swedish company. So the chance to be the first U.S.-porn/internet company to go public still remains, and in America being first at anything always generates publicity—which will entice more traffic to the girls of Club Love. In addition, Seth Warshavsky has an ace in the hole: online electronic trading. It’s now possible for investors to own shares in his company without the shame of having to talk to a broker over the phone.

"If widgets sold as well as sex," Seth says, "I would sell widgets. But nothing seems to sell as fast as sex."

Indeed. IEG has recently branched out and built a casino site, an auction site, a natural medicine online store, and an online surgery site, but around the office employees admit that Seth is too impatient to invest the time and money it takes to build an audience for those mainstream ventures when he can make his money back in 30 days on any investment into sexual content.

"I have zero attention span," Seth admits. "I can’t even sit still enough to watch a movie." He lives a life constantly interrupted by incoming telephone calls on the several cellular phones he carries. (One night we went to the gym, and during his twenty minutes on the stairclimber his StarTac rang seven times.) The only sport that he can watch is boxing. "No other sport can hold my attention." Boxing is fast, brutal, and over quickly. Seth makes it to all the big fights in Vegas. It is this clinical lack of attention span that has driven his life and pretty much made him who he is. Nothing is fast enough for him.

Growing up in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, he was pretty much a typical precocious brainiac. When he was only ten years old, he taught classes in BASIC programming at the Pacific Science Center. When he was thirteen, he created an online adventure game called Dungeon Quest, charging users $2 an hour and selling ads to local computer stores, earning him $3,000 a month. When he got to high school, though, his lack of attention span made concentrating in class impossible. He tested high, but his grades were poor, and he dropped out before he was seventeen. He was an only child of happily-married blue-collar parents, but he moved into a studio apartment in downtown Seattle. One night, watching late-night cable programming, he saw an infomercial for a phone-sex operation called Rhonda’s Phone Club. "These guys must be making a fortune!" he exclaimed to his friend Josh. Seth was still too young to even make a legal phone sex call himself, but that didn’t stop him. The next day Seth put $7,000 in debt on his credit card and the two boys entered the business with the number 1-800-GET-SOME.

He quickly found that most phone sex collection bureaus were "skimming" calls, in effect underreporting volume and pocketing the cash. Stealing. Seeing a business opportunity, Seth legitimized the process, much as he wants to do now with the internet traffic, and built a telephony network which carried the call volume for dozens of other phone sex operators. By 1995, this go-getter had $60 million in revenues.

His franchise was destroyed when Congress passed laws blocking most 900-number access and the Federal Communications Commission issued an advisory against foreign-routed 10XXX numbers, but Seth Warshavsky was too entrepreneurial to sit still. At about the same time that Bill Gates wrote his famous capitulation memo to all Microsoft employees urging them to "embrace and extend" the internet, Seth Warshavsky invested $3 million into a cutting-edge web site. Only a few months later, in January of 1996, he launched Club Love (then called CandyLand). Now, with IEG’s revenues back up, Seth is looking for more. $14 million in profits is not nearly enough for him.

Speed is his only reliable high. He takes no drugs, except he tried Viagra with an old girlfriend, reporting that it kept him hard for eight hours and increased the blood flow to his partner’s genitals tenfold, convincing him that he should be selling the pills on his Naturemed site. "I’m profiting $3,000 a day on that," he says. He rarely drinks, except when entertaining business partners. One night some industry girls were coming over to his posh 23^rd floor condominium just north of downtown Seattle. Seth didn’t know what kind of booze to buy; he ran down to the local liquor store and panicked, spending $500 on "one-of-everything" to make sure he would have what the girls wanted, which turned out to be vodka and cranberry. From his living room he can see the ship traffic on Elliott Bay, and with the benefit of a high-powered telescope (why does this not surprise me?) see right into the living rooms of waterfront condominiums a mile away.

His condo is immaculate. In his den, he has a watch collection, each timepiece carefully lined up in a display case. His toilet reading is Detour magazine, organized by month. There are only two books behind his many smoked-glass bookcases, Daniel Boorstein’s The Discoverers and a volume about the Torah. "I can’t read a whole book," he laments, knowing how his attention span has kept him from embracing all that is worthy in society. To cope with his scattermind he’s become obsessive-compulsive, a neat freak. He gets his hair cut weekly, and when he takes his shirt off in the gym I see that he’s had the hair on his back removed, though it’s starting to grow back. He bench presses his weight, which is about 140-and-dropping, thanks to a dietary regime Vivid Video CEO Steve Hirsch turned him on to. Seth checks his gut in the mirror, patting the small amount of remaining liposoidal tissue. He throws himself into another set of crunches. "It is the perfect diet for an obsessive-compulsive," he explains between sets. "I eat every two hours, alternating 100% protein with 100% carbohydrates." Oatmeal at eight a.m., egg whites at 10 a.m., white rice at noon, et cetera. "But my energy in unbelievable. I have such good energy."

"What should we do tonight?" he asks. "I want to go tanning." The Seattle weather gets him down.

We go to El Gaucho, a supper club in nearby Belltown. Seth wants the ostrich filet—"but dry," he tells the waiter. "No oil, no butter, no sauce. And bring us some of that oxygenated water."

He’s weird, no doubt about it. He’s just enough of a goofy oddball to be fun to watch. It’s not an act. He’s really like this.

But back to speed. Seth got so many speeding tickets driving his 7-series BMW that his license was revoked for a year, forcing him to hire a chaffeur to get around and to buy a boat for his speed jollies. But not just any speedboat. A Cobalt. The Cobalt 293 is the Gulfstream V of the boating set: top-of-the-line, no expenses spared. Shaped like a bullet, 29-feet long on the centerline, it weighs nearly four tons. Twin 415-mph Volvo sterndrive engines give it a cruising speed of 70 miles per hour. The fuel tank capacity is 111 gallons. Sunk into the teak dashboard is a global positioning system. This is an ocean-worthy vessel. Make no mistake: it’s a cigarette boat—the boat of choice for drug runners—dressed up to look like any other weekend cruiser on Lake Washington. The boat is a pretty good metaphor for IEG, which is dressed up to look like any other internet company in the Seattle area.

"He’s nearly killed us a few times in that boat," says one of Seth’s co-workers. "I’m kind of glad he keeps it in dry-storage during the winter, otherwise he might kill you trying to impress you with its turning radius."

Six months ago Seth got his driver’s license back. Now he’s in a jetblack four-door Jaguar XJR. He’s only received two speeding tickets in that time. He knows he’s got to clean up his image a little if he wants to go public. That will be the big question: how will he respond to the public scrutiny, to having his privacy invaded? He’s just completed his 1998 financial audit, but he’s still going to be subjected to the Securities & Exchange Commission’s version of the butt plug cam. Investors are going to find out about his 1993 misdemeanor plea for knowingly reselling a stolen computer, and about the 1994 anti-harassment order issued against him after threatening an associate, and the two 1996 collection auctions that were initiated against IEG after a failure to pay bills during the transition from phone sex to net sex. It is this kind of dirt-disclosure that has kept other adult-sites from considering an IPO, says Forrester Research’s Entertainment Analyst, Mark Hardie. "There are a dozen adult sites even bigger than IEG, but they prefer to remain low-profile. They’re afraid that if they’re easy to find, they’d be easy for regulators to shut down."

When it comes to business, Seth Warshavsky’s gift is also his curse. His super-aggressive dynamo style makes him someone investors want to ride the market with, but it’s that same fearlessness around risk that gets him into such hot legal troubles, exposing him time and again to lawsuits. Investors hate lawsuits.

The next day at the IEG offices downtown, Seth’s lawyer shows me a cease-and-desist letter from attorneys representing Jack Nicholson, warning that they are about to slap IEG with a lawsuit for defamation and invasion of privacy. It’s an area of law Derek Newman has had plenty of experience with in his two years since passing the bar. "This is a dream job for me," he says. He’s won every time he’s gone to court, though some times it’s taken an appeal to a higher court, as in this week’s controversy. To coincide with the Pope’s visit to St. Louis, Seth had authorized a satirical sex spoof involving a Pope look-a-like and some girls in nun habits. The Archdiocese of St. Louis sued for, of all things, trademark violation of the term "Papal Visit." They won a temporary injunction and the judge ordered IEG to pull the plug on the site. Seth complied, and he has no intention of putting the site back up (it didn’t sell that well, anyway), but he has to decide whether to appeal the judge’s decision to the 8^th circuit.

"We kind of have to, don’t we?" Seth asks Derek. The logic here is that they have to retain their track record of never backing down, otherwise celebrities will get the idea IEG can be intimidated.

"Yes, I guess we do," Derek answers. Neither of them are looking forward to it. Even around the office, a lot of staff feel that in disrobing the Pope, Seth has gone too far.

Seth wants to know how much it’s going to cost to pay outside counsel to handle the matter. Twenty grand is the price they’ve been quoted. "Whittle them down to fifteen grand," Seth decides, "then let’s do it."

Ever since he’s taken on Pamela Anderson, Seth has become the guy to call with hot tips on legally-difficult material. Recently they were presented with the videotape of Dallas Cowboys Kevin Williams and Michael Irvin having consensual sex with a woman who later claimed she was raped. When the video was played in Texas court, the suit against the athletes was thrown out, but a copy made it to IEG. Seth wouldn’t broadcast it. "I didn’t think we had a legal right,"he explains.

One of his many cell phones rings. It’s an operative in Las Vegas who is on his way to meet with Mike Tyson. Iron Mike wants Seth to webcast his locker room for the hour preceding his next fight. "Let’s do it," Seth days. (The next day, Tyson would be sentenced to jail, postponing the deal.)

Let’s do it is a phrase I hear repeatedly spoken by Seth. A deal to provide the video feed to Buttsville.com? Let’s do it. Two tickets to the Stones in Vegas on Friday? Let’s do it. He makes decisions instantly or not at all. More floor space available upstairs for his growing number of employees? Let’s do it.

IEG’s offices are like any other internet company: a little fly-by-night, with extra terminals set up in hallways and green-haired programmers raiding the refrigerator for cases of Coke. He has about thirty employees jammed in here and another fifty in the warehouse across town, attached to the studio where the performances are broadcast. It’s no surprise that sex sells, but what is less often pointed out is that sex is really cheap to produce. The warehouse and theme rooms are a far cry from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. Cheap royal blue shag carpet, hastily erected floor-to-ceiling masonboard walls without doors, exposed venting and wiring. All of IEG’s 120 sites carry the same video feeds from this building. Most of the money is in labor costs for the live performances. (Briefly, Seth investigated creating a hard core operation in the Carribean, where he could cut costs substantially by flying girls in from Czechoslovakia for a month at a time).

"The money’s not that good," Destiny tells me, during one of her fifteen-minute breaks. She’s wearing a sparkly blue halter and hotpants. She makes $20 an hour, which works out to about forty grand a year, before taxes—more than she could make as a 21-year old secretary. She was a former Miss Teen San Diego who got pregnant at 16, left home, lost the baby, and was enticed into lingerie modeling with a friend. Before too long she was working the peep shows. She had to deal with stalkers and preachers, something she doesn’t have to cope with any more. There was a lot of drug use among those girls—"they took drugs to not think about what they were doing. Crank, coke, some weed." When Destiny found a syringe on the peep room floor, she quit. It’s that element that doesn’t go on at IEG. Because they don’t have to fight off old drunk men all the time, the girls here don’t have to deny what they’re doing. The technology separates them from their voyeurs, so they can be a lot more private when they’re publicly exposing themselves. The rule for visitors like me is that it’s okay to look but not to stare. "Just don’t drool," Mara Mehren advised me.

Destiny adds, "The best thing about it here is that in a strip club, we’re competing with other girls for tips. That competition made it hard to have friends. Here, we’re like one big family. Seth has brought a lot of integrity to the sex business. Mara is like our den mother. This is a great place to work."

She’s been here for three months. She’s made a couple videos with a dildo but "I would never fuck anyone for money." She might have a cover on Cherry Poppers magazine next month. I ask her what she’s going to do with her stock options when IEG goes public. "If it goes up right away, like these other internet stocks, I’m going to sell them." Then, with the proceeds, she intends to quit the business and establish herself as a day trader. Her boyfriend is a stock broker.

Michael and Monet come out of the Couples Room to talk with me. He puts on blue windpants, while she dresses in white hotpants and a gauzy tank top. He works as a software consultant part-time at UPS, and she’s studying nutrition. When she gets her degree she’s going to the University of Connecticut for her master’s. All of the other performing couples are couples in real life, too, except for these two. They’re just friends doing it for the cash, four hours a day. Everything at IEG is cable-standard compliant, meaning it’s not hard-core—they can’t show male-female penetration. This means that despite rubbing against Monet for the past five months, Michael has never actually gotten some.

"Don’t you want to?" I ask. "Like, after hours?"

"Oh, yeah," he laughs.

But Monet says, "I just don’t think of him that way."

"You don’t think of him sexually, even though he bathes you with his tongue four hours a day?"

She shrugs. She’s chewing gum and rolls her eyes. What can she say? "The time goes by quick. Four hours a day is a lot better than eight hours."

Mara Mehren auditions these performers by putting them in front of a private camera for ten minutes. Interestingly, it’s not how they perform on the tape that determines whether they’re hired, because it’s easy to close one’s eyes and gyrate seductively to one’s personal fantasies. Over eight hour shifts, fantasy disappears and reality sets in. Mara sits down and makes the auditioner watch her own video with other people around. A woman that is comfortable watching herself is more likely to be psychologically at ease with the job, will have a better attendance record, and avoid drugs.

Here at the turn of the millenium, its easy to be afraid that the supercharged economics of both pornography and internet stocks are two runaway trains headed for an unavoidable collision—that this slope is too slippery to prevent it from getting way out of hand very, very fast. But in talking with these and other IEG performers, I found that they were all perfectly comfortable drawing a line at what they would and would not do—that it was not getting out of hand, and in fact it was getting marginally better.

"Men are not the pigs they’re cracked up to be," Pam surmised, taking over the controls in the broadcast booth from Mara Mehren. She explained the Party-Line Effect. "When there’s several guys on the audio line or in the chat room, they say the crudest of things because they think that’s how they’re supposed to treat us and they try to show off to each other. But when just one is on the line, and he’s alone, he’s always sweet. He asks about the weather. The men who consume porn are just as normal as anyone else."

She adds, "I’ve got two kids. I just had my second baby boy, so I’ve given up performing for awhile. We’re just normal people too."

Right then we are joined by Seth and Cort St. George, a friend of Seth’s who is running the online surgery site. He’s a nice guy who likes golf and used to box in college at Arizona. He asks Pam if she will do "that breast milk thing" again for the videocamera, which I’m beginning to understand is just the sort of thing that normal people do today. But she says that’s gross, people wouldn’t like it. He insists that he liked it. It’s just the sort of bizarre, clinical reality that people on his site want. He’s already broadcast live breast implant surgery and liposuction. Apparently, onlinesurgery.com is developing a steady audience even without spending Seth’s money. Cort describes the procedure for rhinoplasty: "The nose is slit at the nostrils and flipped inside-out, then the septum is butterflied … It’s really gross, but people can’t take their eyes off it. They love it. Man, people are really weird."

I look (but do not stare) at Pam’s boobs. She is wearing a white doily tank top and her boobs are massive creamy mounds. Oh so very real.

Seth, who has barely been paying attention to this everyday office chatter, suddenly takes interest.

"No Seth," Pam says.

"Why not?" Cort asks. "You flash the live camera when users ask, don’t you?"

"That’s different," Pam insists.

"Would it sell?" Seth asks his friend Cort. There’s that boyish grin again.

I’m waiting for the words. Let’s Do It. Let’s Do It. Let’s Do It.

She protests more emphatically.

"No, Seth. No."

I’m finding this all quite amusing until I realize I’ve been standing around for three hours and I really have to pee.