.....and by the end of the day Monday, it will almost all be gone.

Here is my tale of how I became an almost-centimillionaire, and how my fortune will disappear like dust in the wind.

The story begins in the middle of the dot-com bubble, when I was working as a research analyst for an investment bank. At the time, like many of my colleagues, I made some personal venture investments in what I thought were promising startups. In retrospect, it turns out to have been a supremely bad time to be making venture investments, and nearly every one of my investments turned out to be worth nothing within a few years.

A couple of companies held on, though, and about a month ago one of them went public. I'd been invested in this company nearly a decade, though boom, bust, bridge loan, cramdown, recap, split, reverse split, and finally IPO. Not much was left of my original investment, and the IPO was at less than half the price I'd originally paid for the shares so long ago. Nevertheless, getting something back is better than nothing.

Because of the IPO and concurrent stock adjustments, all the pre-IPO shares had to be reissued, and everyone would get new stock certificates.

This evening I arrived home late with the family, since we took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner (Friday nights are special time with the whole family). There was a FedEx envelope waiting for me from the company handling the stock transfer.

I opened the envelope to find a stack of papers. The top sheet was a shiny new stock certificate made out to me, for a grand total of about 141,000 shares.

"That's odd," I thought, "I was only expecting a couple thousand shares at most. Maybe the enclosed letter explains it."

So I turned to the next page and discovered another stock certificate, with my name on it, for about 444,000 shares.

Then another stock certificate for a few million shares.

And another, and another. In total, there were about eight stock certificates in the envelope, all in my name, totaling about 5.7 million shares. No letter, no explanation, nothing.

That's about 14% of the entire company. At today's close of $13.99/share, it's worth about $80 million. My guess is that someone screwed up the database of shareholders, and put my name on a whole bunch of certificates which should have gone to other pre-IPO investors.

Sadly, those shares aren't really mine even if the piece of paper says so. As soon as I realized the mistake, I looked up the CFO (I hadn't actually talked to anyone at this company in probably six years) and left him a voicemail. Since it was already 6 PM California time, he'd gone home for the weekend.

I expect that they'll ask me to FedEx the certificates back on Monday. Maybe they'll let me keep a (voided) souvenir copy, or, if I'm a really tough negotiator I might get them to treat me to lunch for my honesty.

But at least for this weekend, I'm worth $80 million on paper. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

P.S. If anyone knows Mike Healy, Chief Financial Officer of ShoreTel, tell him to check his voicemail. I'll be expecting his call.