Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (84 page)

Possibilities as to the Piano Man’s identities came in from all over the world. Some of the more promising leads:

• A street mime from Rome told Italian police that he recognized the Piano Man as a French street performer named Steven Villa Masson. Reporters from the British newspaper the
Independent
found Masson at his home in Paris, so he wasn’t the Piano Man.

• An Italian TV news show uncovered footage of a 2000 music festival that featured a concert pianist who bore a strong resemblance to the Piano Man. His facial structure was similar, and festival participants recalled that he didn’t talk much. He also was tracked down and ruled out. He wasn’t the Piano Man, either.

• Klaudius Kryspin, a Czech drummer, identified the Piano Man as Tomas Strnad, with whom he had played in a band called Ropotamo in the 1980s. He hadn’t seen Strnad since 1996, but when he saw the picture in the newspapers, he said, “I knew it was Tomas.” Michael Kocab, the band’s lead singer, backed up Kryspin’s assertion that the Piano Man looked exactly like Strnad, but it turned out that Kocab had seen the real Strnad on April 10 in Prague, three days
after
the Piano Man had showed up in England, so he couldn’t have been the Piano Man.

• Susanne Schlippe Steffensen, a Danish politician, told reporters that the Piano Man was her husband, whom she hadn’t seen since February when he went to Algeria to visit his family. Steffenson thought he must have wound up in England after a fight with his mother. She went to the West Kent Trust to meet her “husband,” but it wasn’t him.

• Several Norwegian college students came forward to identify the Piano Man as an Irish exchange student they’d once known. Norwegian newspapers were able to quickly locate the real exchange student. He wasn’t the Piano Man.

• Orchestras across Europe were contacted to see if any of them was missing a pianist. Nobody was.

By August 2005, no leads had panned out and the Piano Man still wasn’t speaking, although he was beginning to show signs of having a better rapport with caregivers—for one thing, he was eating and drinking regularly. His social worker Michael Camp told reporters that it was a possibility that they might never learn the man’s identity. “If nobody can name this guy, then I don’t see how we can possibly find out,” he said.

Camp also said that while doctors initially thought the Piano Man must have suffered a highly traumatic event and was in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder, they were now beginning to think that his extremely withdrawn nature but spectacular piano skill suggested that he must be autistic.

Then, on August 21, just a couple of weeks later, the Piano Man suddenly snapped out of it. According to his doctors at the West Kent Trust (who could reveal only a little information because of doctor-patient confidentiality), he suddenly remembered his name and that he was German. His identity was confirmed with the German embassy, which issued the Piano Man a replacement passport and flew him home.

Three days later, the Piano Man’s name was revealed to the public as Andreas Grassl, a 20-year-old student from a farming family in Prosdorf, Germany. How had he wound up in England?
In March 2005, Grassl had been working, ironically, as a caregiver in a mental hospital in Saarbrücken, Germany, when he decided to quit his job, move to Paris, and enroll in school there. Grassl called his parents in Prosdorf to let them know he was going to France. After not hearing from him for weeks, they reported him missing to German officials, who told the Grassls there wasn’t much they could do—their son was last seen in another country, and he was an adult.

Grassl couldn’t enroll in school, he had trouble finding work, and a love affair soured, all leading to a severe depression. He left France and took a train to England, where he decided to commit suicide by drowning himself in the sea at Kent. He actually went into the water but then had second thoughts, and while he was wandering around town in a state of extreme emotional distress, he was discovered by police. Grassl claims that from the day he was picked up and throughout his stay at the hospital, he was under so much emotional stress that he could neither speak nor remember his name.

The “Piano Man” story was the hottest news story in Europe in the summer of 2005. So how could it be that Grassl’s worried parents never saw his picture on TV or in a newspaper? “I work hard every day, get up early in the morning to see to the cows, so I hardly ever get to read a paper,” Josef Grassl told reporters. “I do watch the news on television, but once I have seen the weather report, I switch it off.”

And here’s the amazing part: the “Piano Man” who had amazed the mental facility staff with his expert piano playing… hadn’t, really. He drew a piano and was allowed to play one, but no one in the media ever witnessed it—reporters merely interviewed hospital staff who had seen him play. Sensationalized news reports exaggerated the claims that he was a concert-level pianist. “The Piano Man” had never received any formal training and had never worked as a professional musician. He was an amateur, at best.

As of 2007, the German pianist who mystified England was studying French literature—not music—at a college in Switzerland.

How one man’s hobby became one of the most successful businesses in history
.

M
YTH-BAY
Here’s the legend of how eBay started: One evening in 1995, computer programmer Pierre Omidyar was talking to his fiancée, Pamela Wesley. She mentioned an old hobby, collecting and trading PEZ candy dispensers, and bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t find any collectors in her area to trade with. And at that moment eBay was born in Omidyar’s mind. The truth: That story was made up by a marketing engineer in 1997 to develop interest in the company. The real story is a bit more complicated…but just as interesting.

Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, the only child of French-Iranian parents. At age six, he emigrated with his family from Paris to the United States so that his father could attend a medical residency at John Hopkins University. Young Omidyar was fascinated with computers from the moment he saw them. His first job: writing a program to catalog his school’s library (he was 16 and earned $6.00 an hour). “I was your typical nerd in high school,” Omidyar recalls. “Or geek—I forget which is the good one.”

After graduating from Tufts University in Boston with a degree in computer science in 1988, Omidyar moved to Santa Clara, California, the heart of Silicon Valley and the Hollywood of the Internet Age. He worked as a programmer for a while, but then in 1991 he and some friends started Ink Development Corp., a “pen-based” computer company. (They’re the computers you operate by touching the screen with a penlike tool.) Over the next few years he led the company away from that and into what he believed was going to really take off one day: Internet shopping. He also came up with a new company name: “eShop.” It wasn’t eBay, or even close to it, but it was successful (Microsoft eventually bought it), and in the meantime, Omidyar was thinking up his own project: an Internet auction site.

Why an auction? Because Omidyar liked the idea of a place where professional middlemen and retailers were out of the way and regular people could buy and sell things directly from and to other regular people. And an auction not only gave buyers power that they couldn’t get in a store, it added some excitement: Display an item; let people start the bidding; when time runs out, the highest bidder gets the goods. It was the ultimate “free market.”

Over Labor Day weekend in 1995, with the project sufficiently developed in his head, Omidyar stayed home and wrote the programming code for an auction-based Web site. On September 3, “AuctionWeb” was launched. It was, he now admits, ugly, clunky, and awkward. And he didn’t even get a specific Internet address for it; he just added it as a page on the site he already had for his Internet-consulting business. The address of that site:
ebay.com
. Why? The consulting business was called Echo Bay Technology Group. (It wasn’t named after a real bay: “It just sounded cool,” he later explained.) He had tried to register it as “
echobay.com
,” but that was taken by a Canadian gold-mining company, so he shortened it and
ebay.com
was born.

At the time he launched the auction site,
ebay.com
had three different home pages. The first one took you to the consulting business; a link could then connect you to “San Francisco Tufts Alliance,” a Tufts University alumni group that his wife headed (he and Pamela had since married); another link then sent you to “Ebola Information”—a tribute to the deadly ebola virus. (Omidyar has a warped sense of humor.) From there you could finally get to AuctionWeb.

No money went into advertising. To generate interest, he relied solely on Internet message boards, where he posted links that simply said “free Web auction.” To his surprise, a lot of people clicked on the link—and started buying and selling stuff. First item sold: Omidyar’s broken laser pointer. It went for $14.83. By the end of its first year, thousands of auctions had taken place and more than 10,000 bids had been made.

Despite its early success, AuctionWeb was still a just hobby for
Omidyar—he was still working as program developer—until his Internet service provider forced him to change from a private to a commercial account because of the amount of traffic the site was getting. That increased his overhead from $30 to $250 a month, so he decided to start charging users a small fee. He thought there would be a backlash from his regulars, but, to his surprise, he received few complaints. And soon checks began arriving in the mail, so many of them, in fact, that he had to hire his first employee to handle all the payments. By March 1996, Auction-Web’s monthly revenue was up to $1,000. By April it was $2,500. By May it was $5,000. By June it was $10,000—and Pierre Omidyar quit the last regular job he’d ever have.

AuctionWeb’s next employee was Jeff Skoll, a computer geek who also had a masters degree in Business Administration from Stanford University. Skoll’s first mission: Get rid of the ebola tribute and the other sites, and make AuctionWeb a stand-alone auction site. Omidyar protested, but, luckily for him, Skoll prevailed. Another good idea from the early days: the bulletin board. New users could post questions, which were answered by more experienced users, giving eBay its very own (free) tech support. One of the most popular bulletin board gurus was a man who called himself “Uncle Griff.” A curious questioner once asked him what he looked like. He responded, “I’m wearing a lovely flower print dress and I just got done milking the cows,” forever etching himself into eBay lore as their “cross-dressing bachelor dairy farmer who likes to answer questions.” He was so good and so respected that in the fall of 1996 Skoll asked him (his name was Jim Griffith, and he lived in Vermont) to help answer technical questions directly for eBay while of course keeping his cross-dressing persona alive on the bulletin board. Uncle Griff accepted—and became eBay’s first tech-support employee.

Everything about eBay seemed to be right for its time and place. Before eBay, someone who wanted to sell a collectible, antique, or electronic item of value had very few options—especially if they lived in the boondocks—which usually resulted in selling it for
much less than it was worth. Omidyar’s online auction changed that. It consolidated buyers and sellers into one connected marketplace, making location almost irrelevant (shipping prices notwithstanding). That meant sellers could get top dollar for their items, and collectors and buyers could more easily find the items they wanted. It was a hugely successful formula, and in 1998, just three years after starting the ebola-virus-linked free auction site, the company went public. On the first day the stock price shot up—and eBay was worth more than $2 billion. By 1999 it was worth more than $8 billion…and Omidyar had become one of the wealthiest people on Earth.

Lots of companies have good starts, but eBay made sure its success lasted. They constantly updated the site and its tools, making it slicker and easier to use by the month. Some of the most notable upgrades: In 1998 they added the “feedback” feature that allows users to rate sellers and buyers, letting other users know whether they’re dealing with a trustworthy person (and encouraging users to police the site at no cost to eBay); in 2002 they purchased the “e-commerce” company PayPal, which allowed for easier Internet payments (eBay gets an additional fee for each transaction); Omidyar and Skoll reached out to companies like Disney, GM, and major airlines to use the site to sell their products. That might seem like it goes against Omidyar’s “regular people” model—and it does—but it obviously didn’t hurt the auction site, and it made the company many more millions of dollars. On top of that they bought up competing sites—like
Half.com
and
Rent.com
—by the dozen.