r America Online's much slower dial-up ser- vice. And, who knows, maybe TCI itself could form a joint venture with AT&T to provide phone service over its cable lines in an end run around the Bell companies that could be a model for deals with other cable providers. With this rough road map in his head, Armstrong returned to Basking Ridge and charged his chief financial officer, Dan Somers, with getting the first element-the acquisition of TCG-sewed up by the beginning of 1998. It would not be easy-TCG was growing SO fast that it was difficult to get a firm fix on anything, its assets, cus- tomer count, receivables, and SO on. Furthermore, some of the AT&T operating people had looked under TCG's hood before and were decid- edly unimpressed. The operation had a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants quality. But Somers fancied himself a deal-maker. He would make this deal happen. Dan Somers Somers had joined AT&T as CFO in the summer of 1997, just five months before Armstrong's appointment. Hired to replace Rick Miller, who had left shortly after John Walter's arrival, Somers had spent six years at Bell Canada, four as CFO of its international division Tough Calls and the last two running a small cable television company that it owned in England. Prior to that he had worked for an investment bank, run a chain of Hardee's franchises in North Carolina, and been president of a small radio station group in Nova Scotia. While Miller had weighed each number on a spreadsheet individu- ally, Somers tried to hear the rhythm of the numbers. He was not big on details. Maybe it was his astigmatism-reading a column of numbers, he would push his glasses up on his forehead, bend down to his desk until his chin was practically on the surface, and squint. In any case, he tended to use round numbers in the style of the invest- ment banker he had been early in his career. When Somers joined the discussion about merging TCG into our own local operations, he found a roomful of engineers and lawyers arguing about "indefeasible rights of use," "r