Amidst this drudgery, Glover and Dockery soon became friends. Dockery, clownish and extroverted, provided Glover with amusement. Glover, taciturn and diligent, provided Dockery with a ride. Despite appearances, the men had much in common. They liked the same music. They made the same money. They knew many of the same people. Most of all, they were fascinated by computers.
This was an unusual proclivity for two working-class Carolinians in the early 1990s—the average Shelbyite was more likely to own a hunting rifle than a PC. But Glover and Dockery were ahead of the curve. Their computers both had modems, and they had begun to experiment with bulletin board systems and the nascent culture of the Internet. In 1995, the online world was still largely a fragmented archipelago of homegrown servers, most of which couldn’t talk to one another. Like the Galápagos, the bulletin boards were isolated islands that developed distinct vocabularies and cultures, and you connected to them by dialing a phone number you got from the back of the newspaper.
Glover’s interest in technology was inherited. His father had been a mechanic. His grandfather, a farmer, had moonlit as a television repairman. Glover, born in 1974, was their namesake, and they called him Dell to avoid confusion with the two other Bennie Glovers around the house. Things had been hard for his forebears: their lives were defined by the era of “colored” discrimination that Dell had only narrowly missed. In a time of entrenched, endemic racism, the elder Glovers had carved out niches as “tinkerers,” capable men who could fix anything from a blown vacuum tube to a busted gasket.
As a child, Dell had expressed an indefatigable interest in cars, motorbikes, radios, televisions, and anything else with engines or circuitry. He relentlessly sought to understand how machinery worked, taking it apart and reassembling it over and over again. His father, himself a quiet, practical man, had encouraged these interests. Dell remembered fondly his first ride on a tractor, followed by a terse discussion of how the machine worked and what each part did.
At the age of 15, Dell purchased his first computer. His mother was there with him in the electronics department at Sears. The year was 1989, a time when the PC was still the domain of hobbyists. The Sears catalog from that year outlined the specs of a typical machine: 2 megabytes of RAM, a 28-megabyte internal hard drive, a one-color monitor, and two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. The total cost ran to $2,300, a purchase perhaps better understood in contemporary, inflation-adjusted terms: Glover had paid the equivalent of $4,000 for a 20-pound box with less computing power than a low-end cell phone.
He didn’t have the cash up front, so Sears offered him an installment plan, with his mother as cosignatory. To make the payments, he took a summer job as a dishwasher at Shoney’s. When school started that year, he continued to work, commuting directly from campus to the restaurant and working until eleven at night, every weekday, even Friday. His grades suffered and his overall interest in school declined, but Shoney’s management was impressed by this capable and tireless worker. By the time he graduated, he was running the kitchen.
Around this time, too, Glover’s nights became difficult. While sleeping, his breathing became constricted, and he would choke or snort, and then awake with a start. On a bad night this could happen several times in an hour. Glover’s sleep apnea was a chronic, undiagnosed condition that made his days groggy and his nights unbearable. It was a contributing factor to the grueling routine that he stuck with into his 40s: 12 hours of work, followed by some free time on the computer, followed by four or five hours of troubled, restless sleep. On weekends he went bowling.
After graduation, and following an indifferent stint at community college, Glover began to look for full-time employment. Food service was out. Shoney’s was a grease trap, and Glover was tired of smelling like fryer oil. But he walked away from the job having learned a valuable lesson: if you worked hard, you got a promotion. For the next two years Glover moved furniture, and supplemented his income with a succession of low-wage rotations from a temp agency. In 1994, he was placed in a long-term engagement working weekends at the PolyGram plant.
PolyGram. The name and the job had piqued Glover’s interest. He knew the company as a music label, but wasn’t familiar with its roster. In time, he would come to learn that PolyGram was just a division of a much larger corporate entity: Philips, the consumer electronics giant headquartered in Holland, the co-inventors of the compact disc. In addition to being a digital enthusiast, Glover was an avid music consumer, and he was fascinated by compact disc technology. He’d recently made the transition from tapes to CDs, and a few months earlier he had even purchased a used player with the express intention of taking it apart. He had taken inventory of the component parts: a mechanical drive, a headphone jack, the standard array of circuitry, and a small consumer-grade laser. The discs themselves contained a series of microscopic grooves, representing a series of ones and zeros. The laser fired its beam at the grooves and bounced back the information to a sensor. Then the circuitry translated that information into an electrical impulse, which was sent to a speaker, completing the transformation from digital signals on plastic to analog vibrations in the air.
On his first day at the plant, Glover was presented with the standard battery of workplace paperwork. Among these documents was PolyGram’s “No Theft Tolerated” standard, which barred the unauthorized removal of unreleased compact discs, under threat of termination. The terms of this standard were broad, and extended to unauthorized duplication and “conspiring with others.” Glover signed, dated, and initialed this document, and it was placed in his employee file. Then he was led to the factory floor.
It soon became clear that PolyGram wasn’t employing him for his technical skills. Anyone could be a dropper. Feeding jewel cases into a shrink-wrapper required neither skill nor work ethic, only a heroic resistance to boredom. Occasionally, Glover was tasked with applying the “Parental Advisory” warning stickers by hand, and that was the closest the job ever came to fun. Still, he saw the potential for advancement. Several of the plant’s permanent employees had started out as temps, and some now even worked in management. There was some kind of future here, maybe as a technician, maybe as an overseer. Reaching those heights required only dedication, and the lessons of Shoney’s applied.
In fact, opportunities for advancement were everywhere. The Baptist backwoods of the Carolina foothills were transforming into America’s fastest-growing industrial corridor. In most of the country manufacturing jobs were vanishing, as work was automated or outsourced to Latin America and Asia. But in the Southeast United States the reverse was happening, as favorable tax rates, cheap land, and an antipathy toward organized labor attracted the attention of multinational corporations. In 1993, BMW had opened its first ever automobile factory outside of Germany: not in China, nor Mexico, but Spartanburg, South Carolina, just across the state line from Glover’s hometown. Dozens of other multinationals had followed, including the Dutch conglomerate Philips that had hired Glover. The Carolinas were changing.
Glover’s hometown of Shelby was changing too. The seat of Cleveland County had for decades been a sleepy holdover from the bad old days of the rural South. The town square abutted the train depot, and south of it the main road led past a tony array of colonnaded mansions. Across the highway, property values plummeted, following a predictable pattern of racial segregation. Divided by race and geography, the town’s population remained united by religious denomination. More than two dozen Baptist churches ministered to Shelby, and in summer outdoor faith healings and tent revivals were a common sight.