ly judged by made-up or secondary Focusing on the Bottom Line metrics such as "eyeballs" or "page hits." Those may have been interesting met- rics' for the operators' egos, but they did not necessarily translate to a bottom line. Within the telecommunications industry, companies often hyped their investments by using metrics that, while impressive, were fundamentally irrele- vant. CLECs and DLECs, for instance, sometimes talked about accessible lines-the number of telephone lines in central offices where they had custom- ers. But the fifth DLEC in a central office with 50,000 residential and 10,000 business subscribers was probably going to get less business than the first one in a CO with 5,000 of each. And those supposedly accessible line counts did not always take into account the Achilles heel of DSL-loop qualification- which often rendered more than half of the lines in some COs functionally inaccessi- ble. CAPs similarly talked about miles of plant, or the number of businesses along their routes, without taking competition into account. Venture capitalists who thrived on such measurements were doing almost everyone a disservice, though the ones who managed to sell shares to the public on time tended to do pretty well for themselves. Accounting Was Scandalous The boom years were also the years of some of the biggest accounting scandals in history. And the company that personified the telecom sector's rapid growth, WorldCom, was one of the most flagrant practitioners of creative accounting. Other major scandal-ridden companies were also involved in telecom. Enron became the poster child for accounting fraud, taking down giant audit firm Arthur Andersen with it. Although not primarily a telecom shop, its Enron Broadband unit had promised big profits based on trading bandwidth, just as the parent company had traded energy. Its claims were, in large part, lies, designed to support an excessive stock price. Adelphia Communications' and Tyco Interna- tional's scandals were less about fictitious accounting than abo