Then she clicked off. She’d hung up, completing her prank call, and now she must’ve been rolling around on the floor, laughing hysterically.

We were temporarily dumbstruck. Then we started laughing hysterically over the phone to each other too. A bucket of shit. A bucket of shit. We carried on hysterically. How could we have been so dumb? A normal contest I probably would have forgotten by now, but that bucket of shit has stayed with me always.

Even until now, apparently. In their anxiousness to cure their own corporate malaise, to win by stealing what they’d thought were our crown jewels, the big companies were stealing what they thought was the big prize while we were distracted with other problems. Unfortunately for them, all they got was my bucket.

I lay in bed laughing once again. The resignations had saved us millions more than we’d even hoped for, and made us much more efficient.

“Are you sure there’s no one else waiting to resign?” I asked all the division managers. “Nobody else we could let AT&T steal from us?”

“Now, don’t be a pig, Howard,” they counseled.

The improvement in service on the Internet side was so dramatic that cancellations started to fall to levels undreamed of. From eight hundred a day, to six hundred, then soon under two hundred, then under a hundred. Soon more accounts were signing on by referral as a result of new large corporate accounts. The Internet business was not just turning a big profit, it was growing as well. Every other large Internet access company in the country was reporting multimillion-dollar monthly losses, and we were coining money. Wall Street, discouraged by the losses, was still valuing this segment of our business at almost nothing.

“Sell to a big phone company,” the bankers advised. “We’ll broker the deal.”

Looking at the actual numbers, though, and at the organization we’d built, I was not too motivated by their advice.

“I’ll listen to any absolutely unbelievable offer,” I replied, “but, frankly, I’d much rather keep it.”

And we did.