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Searching for yesterday's headliners
His 15 minutes over, DotComGuy savors the offline life 06/30/2002
For 365 of the Internet's boom days, DotComGuy was the cyberworld's
equivalent of a flagpole-sitter.
The Dallas man gathered sponsors and attracted worldwide attention with
his pledge to seal himself inside his apartment for a year, living
entirely off e-commerce items shipped into the "DotCompound."
DotComGuy even ordered his pet, DotComDog, via the Net at ASPCA.org. So
what happened to him? The Business News staff asked that question as
part of a bigger search – the hunt for some of the people, places and
things who enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame – or notoriety – then
somehow faded away.
The result is Follow-up File, a new weekly feature.
It's a chance to catch up with yesteryear's headliners and maybe even
find some fresh news.
"I had fun," DotComGuy says of his year 2000 experience, "and I don't
regret a minute of it." Today DotComGuy, 28, is a human resources
analyst for Trammell Crow Residential.
Although he says he would do it all again, DotComGuy claims he never
received the $98,304 in promised fees for the experiment, and management
problems have left him vulnerable to an Internal Revenue Service action
for unpaid staff withholding taxes.
His life online has shriveled to a spare presence at
www.dotcomguy.ws, where he still fields requests for occasional speaking
engagements.
But his personal life, he says, has never been better. At
AnneandMitch.com, you can see why. DotComGuy, who goes by his birth name,
Mitch Maddox, on the site, plans to marry Anne Rehfeldt of Fort Worth,
the great-great-granddaughter of the founder of the Acme Brick Co.
"You could say," he says, "we're the ultimate 'clicks-and-mortar'
arrangement."
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