Jan Koum

1997, Mountain View, California.

Jan Koum sits in the front of a table.

The apartment is in the dark, the only light is coming from a screen, 486 PC that his mom bought him from three months of cleaning.

“Jan, your father asked me to ask you to call him whenever you can.”

Jan didn’t pay much attention and stares at the screen.

It shows a black terminal. Telnet

kyiv.freenet.ua

Lag: 800ms

“Are you even listening to me, Jan Koum?” She asked again, yelling from the small kitchen. Listening to his full name, Jan realises the seriousness of the situation.

“Yes, I am listening,” he said as he looked at a phone card.

10 MINUTES - $10

0 MINUTES LEFT

He promised he’d call Papa last month, but then the rent hit. Ten dollars became groceries, the card became a bookmark in his C++ manual.

“Then when will you call him?” She asked but at the same time phone rings, the apartment manager’s of course. Downstairs.

Sofia goes to attend the call, she knew it was for her. Jan follows her, and then saw her back becoming rigid.

“Da, Ponimayu.” Yes, I understand.

She hung up the call and turns her back to him.

Words didn’t come out easily but Jan was intelligent enough to read her lips movements.

“Papa,” barely a whisper.

“He passed away due to heart attack, yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” He whispers in shock.

The sound didn’t register at first. It hit his chest like a delay in the terminal. 800ms. Then 1 second. Then nothing.

His fingers went numb on the phone card. The plastic edge dug into his palm but he didn’t feel it. He was still waiting for the word to bounce back with an error message: User not found. Try again.`

He opened his mouth but air got stuck. No words came out, just a small, broken breath he tried to hide by looking down at the screen.

“Yesterday” he was debugging a print function at San Jose State. “Yesterday” his dad was alive and he knew it but guess he never knew it.

His eyes burned. He blinked fast, like he could debug this too. Like if he stared hard enough at the cursor blinking on the black screen, his dad would type back: `Call when you can`.

But the cursor just blinked. And blinked. And didn’t answer.

The 800 ms lag became 24 hours!

“I need to call Aunt Irina,” Jan grabs the 0 minutes card but the annoying robotic voice appeared.

“You have zero minutes remaining.”

“This stupid card. I couldn’t talk to him, he also had zero minutes remaining,” he yells at his mom, at the card, at the device for no reason until grief took over him.

“We need to go the funeral,” he says after a while.

“We have only a few dollars, we can’t. The funeral is in two days,” she said, tears finally appearing in her eyes.

He looked at the code he wrote on the PC.

“I wanted to ask him if this code is correct. But huh, 10 minutes win,” he said in a tired voice.

Call when you can. His father wrote him in his previous letter. Jan Koum stared at it, his eyes welling up.