By Vahid Razavi
People keep asking me about the domain name. It deserves an
explanation, and the explanation happens to be the story of how I got
into technology in the first place.
I was nineteen and sending resumes to anyone in Silicon Valley who
would take one. The first place that called me back was Fry’s
Electronics in Palo Alto. If you weren’t here then, Fry’s was
the superstore for computers and electronics — aisles of
components, software in shrink wrap, a checkout line that ran the length
of the building.
I showed up in a suit and tie. They offered me a job on the spot:
cashier, $5.50 an hour. That was less than half of what I had been
making part-time in a lab at Amylin Pharmaceuticals in San Diego while I
was a student at UCSD. I took it, because you take the offer in front of
you when it is the only one you have. But I walked out of that building
deflated. I had wanted floor sales — computers, electronics, the
products I actually knew something about. They put me behind a
register.
Instead of getting on the freeway, I took El Camino Real north toward
my house in Redwood City. That decision changed my life, though not for
any reason you would guess.
Somewhere in the unincorporated stretch of Redwood City — North Fair
Oaks — I saw a sign for a place called Hanky Panky. I had a friend’s
California ID in my wallet that said I was over twenty-one. I went in
and ordered a beer.
I found out later that Hanky Panky ran two businesses out of the same
building. During the day it was a neighborhood bar with pool tables. At
night it turned into a topless club. The owners were a Latino couple who
both worked the bar, and along with the beer they served a stew I still
think about thirty years later.
Two beers in, I walked outside and saw a sign across the street:
Computer Attic — Now Hiring.
I had a bad job offer in my pocket and just enough liquid courage to
do something about it. I walked in and handed over my resume. A manager
named Don came out to talk to me — an older guy, played in a band, loved
music, deep into the Grateful Dead. We talked for maybe fifteen minutes.
He was warm and encouraging in the way that nineteen-year-olds remember
for the rest of their lives, and he asked me to come back the next day
to meet the other managers.
I got the job. Sales associate.
Within a month I had done over $100,000 in retail sales, won employee
of the month, and earned the parking space directly in front of the
store’s door. A couple of months after that I was moved into corporate
sales. From there I went on to Bay Networks, Nortel, Exodus, AboveNet,
to building my own companies, and eventually to a desk inside Amazon Web
Services. The entire career I now spend my time writing critically about
started because I got turned down for floor sales, took a side street
home, and had two beers in a bar at the wrong age.
My full tech resume is at VahidRazavi.com if you want
the rest of it.
So what happened to Hanky
Panky?
I went back a few more times for lunch. On one of those visits my
real ID fell out of my pocket and the bouncer picked it up off the
floor. He walked over and asked me whether it was mine. I said no. He
took it to the owner instead, and I went out the back door at a full
sprint — losing a good tie somewhere along the way — while a man chased
me down the street with the longest Maglite I have ever seen in my
life.
The law caught up with the place before I ever went back. In 1995,
after a months-long undercover investigation, San Mateo County sheriff’s
deputies and investigators from the state Department of Alcoholic
Beverage Control raided the club at 2651 El Camino Real. Roughly twenty
officers shut it down and detained fifteen dancers. There was a shouting
match with the owner. The club’s owners ultimately agreed to a
thirty-day suspension of their liquor license on 143 alleged violations.
It made the local news and, if my memory serves, late-night television.
Years later, around the COVID period, the building sold and became a
union hall.
That was the end of Hanky Panky as an establishment.
Why I am using the name
I have always thought it was a great name. But I am not using it for
nostalgia.
“Hanky panky” is the phrase we reach for when everyone in the room
knows something improper is going on and nobody wants to say the ugly
word for it. It is the polite version. It is what you call the thing
when you would rather not call it fraud, or complicity, or a crime.
That is most of what I have watched the technology industry do for
twenty-five years. A company sells targeting and intelligence
infrastructure to the military and calls it a cloud contract. A company
harvests your data and calls it personalization. A company fires the
workers who protest, quietly separates the executive who built the thing
being protested, and calls it a personnel matter. Everybody knows what
happened. The language exists so that nobody has to say it out loud.
Here is the comparison I cannot get out of my head. A topless bar on
El Camino Real got a two-month undercover investigation, twenty
officers, a suspended license, and 143 counts. The companies I document
at NoEthicsInBigTech.com
have supplied the cloud and AI infrastructure sitting underneath
surveillance and targeting systems, and not one of their executives has
been asked a single question under oath.
I know which of those two things is more serious. So does everyone
else.
EndOfHankyPanky.com is where I am going to put the reporting and the
accountability work — the documents, the fact sheets, the sourced
record, the receipts. The name is a joke about a bar I got chased out of
at nineteen. It is also exactly what I want: an end to the polite word
for it.
More on the site and what I am building here in the days ahead.
Related work: NoEthicsInBigTech.com
(the book and the petition to Spain) · ParentsPlea.com · ForeverPeaceNow.com · MyAWSStory.com
Sources for the 1995 details: San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate
reporting on the Hanky Panky Club raid and the subsequent thirty-day
Alcoholic Beverage Control license suspension.
