Like many people who recently moved to the Bay Area, Roger Badanes left his roots in Dayton, Ohio, to move to Silicon Valley in search of IPO gold. He found a job as a project manager for a website offering MP3 resources, and was given 15,000 stock options and a hefty salary.
"Business was fine before Roger came." lamented one coworker. "I was making a killing in the tech stock market, and we were just 3 months from going public. Then HE came."

"Just a couple weeks after Roger got here, the markets crashed. My pets.com turned into a real dog, and Beyond.com... I don't even want to talk about that." commented Steve Horton, Roger's coworker. "I didn't even make the connection of him moving in and the market crashing until he said something like 'Oooh, it figures. I move out here, get a fistful of stock options, and the .com craze dies.' Sure enough, when I looked at the chart, it looked like a pretty amazing coincedence. But when Greenspan blamed Roger personally, well, that cinched it.

"I'm not sure why I have such bad luck." Roger whined, running his hair through his thinning hair. "I've always had a black plague about me when it comes to the stock market. Just a few years ago, I bought a lot of Syquest, and not 2 months later, the company went belly-up.

Roger's sorry for causing the 2 trillion dollar .com meltdown, but says he hasn't given up trying to turn things around. "I'm going long on SGI."