Some workers in high tech industry feel little connection to the dramatic news of loss in value of options and the like. Which is not to say that they don't have their own ways of sharing in the general prosperity. PNS commentator Victor Saldana, 20, is a staff writer for YO! Youth Outlook who works with Silicon Valley De-Bug.

You can feel the anxiety in the air in Silicon Valley. Tech stocks are crashing, dot-coms are giving out pink slips -- but some younger workers are not stressing at all.

This is not surprising since temporary workers in warehouse and assembly were never part of the big money stocks game.

As Antonio Torres, 20, a chip assembler, put it, "Doing this kind of work, you don't get stock options and stuff, so I don't really care when I see in the news that dot-coms are going up or getting tanked."

Aisha Ellis, 23, who has held five different San Jose temp jobs in the past three years, agrees. "I feel sorry for the people that lost a lot of money from this, but it doesn't really affect me."

These young workers do go for big money, but in ways more accessible to them -- such as playing Super Lotto, betting on sports, and other forms of gambling. So at Hewlett Packard, when the company gave employees quarterly updates on how their stocks were doing, the 300 assemblers didn't care because it didn't affect us -- we were all "temps" hired through Manpower.

On the other hand, we were very interested in the Wednesday Super Lotto numbers. Looking at all the money lost in the dot-com implosion, Lotto actually looks like a pretty reasonable investment. You never hear about people losing their homes in an unexpected Lotto Crash

A lady named Barbara on our line was our Lotto kingpin; she would collect money from everybody during lunch breaks and buy the tickets. Every week someone would tell a story of what they would do if we won. Barbara's was always the best. "If I got my hands on all that money," she would say, "I would keep working, just so you could see what a rich lady looks like."

Duc, a Vietnamese man on our line, used to get mad if anybody said the odds were against us. "You don't know, winning is more than possible. This family down the street won $20 million just last year, look." Then he'd show everyone a newspaper clip of a guy and his family, everyone wearing big smiles, in front of a 7-Eleven.

Lotto was not the only way warehouse workers tried to improve their fortunes. Every afternoon break, the guys at HP would roll dice. The stakes weren't that high, but it could mean free lunch for the rest of the week. When you're making $8.00 an hour, that's not bad.

Duc would tell us that we should stick to dice and Lotto, and not get mixed up in the other forms of betting some of the older workers were involved in.

"Don't go to Garden City (a card game spot) or Bay Meadows Racetrack. You will lose too much money and end up frustrated like Anita." Anita was part of a group of workers who went to Bay Meadows racetrack every weekend.

When she'd win -- sometimes thousands of dollars -- she would wear the Bay Meadows hats and jackets that read "Go Baby Go" on it. We used to call her that. If she won big, she would organize a potluck and bring in homemade pies.

When she lost, she would not talk to anyone the whole day. She'd say that we were bad luck.

Rather than going places to gamble, some guys bet after work in the parking lot. Groups of young men would meet to put their money on football or basketball games. Antonio, who organizes one of these betting circles, says, "Supervisors don't mind the dice and card playing, but this kind of gambling is on the hush hush."

During football season, he collects money and team picks from people on his line every Thursday at 5 p.m. sharp. He turns over the money and betting stubs to the guy who handles the whole warehouse.

Antonio says a person can win up to 100 times what he or she puts in, but this rarely happens. He gets a percentage of all bets, but it took him seven months to become what he calls, "The Charles Schwab of warehouse workers."