Take The Deposit And Run

Some people are good at business. Some are good at doing the work. Some are so centered on the work, that they forget the business. That's me. Some are so centered on the business that work takes a backseat. That would be a guy I'll call Urk.

He was the strangest example of manifested charisma. If you turned down the sound and watched him flail and grimace and convulse, you'd say, "poor guy, I'll look for his hockey helmet. Someone keep him from walking into traffic." Turn up the sound and get enveloped in his je ne c'est quois.

People fawned over him and regailed his skills and talents. "Oh, Urk will fix it." "Urk reccomended you. Urk is fantastic." Urk seemed to have a lot of knowledge to match his appeal. More than that, he had business acumen.

Urk set up this system of technical support. He would either work for $60/hr. or sell a block of time for a discount (like $45/hr. for 100 hrs. or $4500). He'd collect the money up front then be available at a moment's notice for 100 hrs. of support. This idea made sense. I've spent a lot of time doing 1 hour of work and 1 hour of explaining my bill for 1 hour. This was a good alternative for an IT professional who needed to be paid; and the business and needed an IT professional.

Urk started to take on bigger projects. Soon, he required help. That's where I came in. I did some database work and some web programming. He set his sites on a BIG job, one that would require an array of servers, real time processsing and Oracle. I committed to ramping up on Oracle. Part of that involved one of the servers; and about $200 in books.

Before I laid down my cash, I asked, "Are you sure this will go ahead? A 100% chance?"
"Yes," he replied. Out went the cash.
A month of so later, he came back to me and said, "Well, there's been a snag and I don't know when the project will get underway."

So, I just ate a server. Hooray. I was probably swept under Urk's appeal, so I kept working with him and doled my blame onto the wouldbe client. Later on, Urk and I worked to start a new company. Somewhere in the process, he decided to leave me out of the corporation. He didn't leave me out. Instead, he made the entry level into the new corporation so stratospheric, that I couldn't join in in their new venture; a little organization I like to call Black Hole Software. All that is another story.

As luck would have it, that fickle client contacted me directly, I waffled on the work, sore because he pulled our project. Nevertheless, I was polite. Late in the phone call, he asked, "What happened to the deposit I gave you and Urk? I gave you $6000 and never saw it again." I have $6000? When did I get $6000? I was broadsided. As it turned out, Urk took the deposit from our client and told me he was committed. Then Urk decided he didn't want to work on the project and pulled the plug. Urk spent $1500 on a server and pocketed the remaining $4500. I spent $1800 between books, a server and software and got nothing.

By this time, Urk was in Black Hole and we were chilly to one another. What did he there dwarfed what he did to me. Eventually his marriage unravelled. Made sense: he was this big opinionated buffoon. His wife was this hot blonde (look at old photos-- she tread water, his looks submerged). She met someone else and called it quits. Urk at the time was living in his wife's parent's basement (true class). After the break up; she moved upstairs. He stayed entrenched in the basement. To try to win her back, Urk would sit at the door to the stairs and wail in dispair. While he was undergoing his marital meltdown, he paid less attention to the Black Hole. More precisely, he abandonned the work but continued to collect money. When he was tired of this vagabond town, he made the rounds to his clients and collected all of the tech support subscriptions (remember the $45/hr. for 100 hrs.?) . Then he took his share of the cash (60+% of each subscription) and moved out of town. That left his partner who got sucked into the Black Hole to do sales. Black Hole's clients-- a mixture of business, individual consultants and non-profit organizations-- started to call for their speedy tech support and only got the sales guy/neophyte techie. So long and thanks for the fish.

Lewis and Oswald : Sex Tourists / IT Magnates

In the latter days of the Internet Boom, anyone could make money on the web. Case in point: Lewis and Oswald. Their names aren't Lewis and Oswald. Those are the names of two idiots from the Drew Carey Show show look alot like these IT entrepeneurs. In an effort to protect the guilty, we'll refer to them as Lewis and Oswald.

Lewis worked in investment companies before the Securities and Exchanges Commission put a spotlight on those businesses and made his ilk uncomfortable. So, he went over to work for an IT company that was really got good at raking in hosting clients and design work. He learned how they did their business. Then, quietly set up his own server and started to encourage his employer's clients to move over to his server. That's when the daily calls started: "Hey, buddy, can you, uh, tell me, uh, how much it costs to, uh, do a database tied into a list of cities?" and off the cuff quote requests. Basically, he gives you a sentence and you have to give him an ironclad quote on the phone without a spec or an idea of scope or timeframe. Eventually, his employer figured that all of his days were spent dealing with his clients and not their clients. They booted his ass. It was time to turn his sideline into a business. The problem (well, one of many) with Lewis: he was user; a user without money. Enter Oswald.

Oswald was this lanky mutton head. If he didn't have money, he would been spitting in your burgers at the Gulp'n'Blow. Instead, his dad worked hard and built a chain of clothing store franchises in the area. He gave one to his dopey son. His dopey son also got to spend as much money as he wanted. Unlike Lewis, Oswald could run an Internet business out of his day job. That's it: an IT empire perched beside a pile of button fly jeans. User Lewis tapped dufus Oswald, his childhood friend for the cash.

They set up more servers, a toll free line and put an ad in the back of Wired. Lewis put his investment skills to work. They did the "pump" part of a pump'n'dump. Logging onto every website that rated web hosts, they gave their services rave reviews. The other web hosts seemed to have good and bad comments, but they were glowing examples of price and service. People loved their speedy Windows servers (they didn't have Windows servers); they loved their custom IT solutions (I did the programming; Lewis and Oswald collected the money).

Before long, they were making money hand over fist: tens of thousands of dollars every month. They leased matching BMWs (what a cute couple!). They partied into the night. They took off to Thailand and parts unknown on sex tours. They had money, nice cars and good looks; so why travel aboard for sex? Simple: they were both users. They couldn't get a disposable girlfriend or deflower a preteen without consequences. Those luxuries were only avalable offshore.

While a thousand or two per month should have gone to keeping their defenses shored up, their servers backed-up and all that; that didn't happen. When crap hit the fan, they begged and borrowed work. I made the mistake of hosting some of my clients there. When their servers were hacked and rampaged, my clients got pissed with me. I worked as hard as I could, but soon I was fighting their fires for free.

Eventually I sent them a bill for some of my services (ie. spend 40 hrs. at $40/hr. keeping their servers aloft; then billing them $300). They waffled on the bill. They delayed paying. When I told them that new work would come after they paid for old work, things got chilly. Still they didn't pay. Eventually, I sicced a collection agency on them. That really pissed them off. They denied the bill. When I sent the collection agency emails where they asked for the work, promised payment and all that, they made up false billing. They charged me for services I never knew existed. They had this knack for inventing people. "Janet" sent me a bill and "Bill" would handle my IT questions. Janet and Bill didn't exist. But, when they asked about this false bill, I told them that I spoke with Janet, she talked to Bill and they cancelled that invoice. When I finally got Oswald on the phone, he waffled and whined. Eventually, he said "We have to start a new company. You wrecked out credit rating." Tee hee. He did promise to pay.

In digging around for information about them, I found an WIPO/ICANN complaint summary where Lewis and Oswald's company had registered a named similar to a competitor's (e.g. their competitor is www.hostho.com and they registered wwwhostho.com) so that if someone misses the "." in www.hostho.com, they would come to Lewis and Oswald's front door. The typo-piracy/cybersquatting rules say that the offending domain has to be moved to the rightful owner's control in exchanges for the fair costs associated (e.g. spend $50 to register almostcoke.com and Coca-Cola has to pay $50 to get the domain if WIPO decides they should get it). Weasel Oswald's actions are best summed up by these WIPO complaint details:

Bad faith

On February 1[#], 200[#], the Complainant sent a letter to the Respondent concerning its registration and use of the disputed domain name and requesting that the Respondent contact the Complainant to resolve the matter. The letter was sent by first class mail to the physical address in [place], [province], Canada listed in the "Whois" registration records of the registrar for the disputed domain name. On April 1[#], 200[#], the Complainant’s counsel telephoned the phone number listed in the "Whois" registration records of the registrar. The phone was answered by "[Oswald]" who refused to give a last name but, when asked, said he had authority to speak for the Respondent concerning the website. [Oswald] claimed that the Respondent sent the Complainant an agreement to transfer the domain name to the Complainant in exchange for a payment to cover the Respondent’s cost of registering the domain name. The Complainant never received the alleged transmittal. [Oswald] refused to send a duplicate copy of the transmittal and stated that the Respondent now wanted the Complainant to make it an offer.

These weasels had dozens of these typo-piracy links under their belt. All of them beat a path to Lewis and Oswald. In essence, they hijacked their competitor's marketing. They managed a "catch-me-if-you-can" mindset in their business activities. At one point, they began answering emails in my name and accepting the blame for what was going on. When I called the police about this, they said there was nothing that could be done if one person impersonates another without the direct intent of fraud. Getting them out of hot water didn't count. After that, Lewis and Oswald seemingly spent two years telling people that their towing company sucks; or that they were dissatisfied with their burger; or asking for more information on Amway; or ordering free samples of Depends.

My favorite example of "their" behaviour was when a Nigerian scammer tried to shuffle money out of the country. The first thing the Nigerian needed to do was get the company to fill out a form with bank account information and signatures. Once that fax was filled out and faxed back, Nigerian funds could be whisked to safety. So, Lewis and Oswald's voice line was accidentally provided instead of a fax number. When the Nigerian complained that the fax didn't work, he was urged to keep trying that same number and do so at all hours of the day and night. Lewis and Oswald's company was very busy and they had business going on at all hours, so the fax had to keep being tried. Also, the Nigerian was assured that he would be reimbursed for all long distance expenses. Janet or Bill would see to that.

I'll Learn Perl After I Teach It

Our company was trying to woo an IT college for a web page. This is like getting to do first aid on a doctor. The truth be known, this IT college probably wasn't able to turn out graduates from its web design programme. They couldn't set up a web server to save their life. Graduates of their graphic design courses couldn't even manage a stick figure in PC Paintbrush. I won't mention the "College" by name. Let's just sum them up with a pseudo-haiku. They are:
Completely
Detrimential to the
Information technology workforce.

After a while, I stopped doing sales calls. Our lead dweeb went out to try to snag the college. He came back after an hour or to announce. "They want me to teach their Perl course.... can someone teach it to me?" He wasn't joking. Even though he had a Perl book on his book shelf, he had never cracked it.

When it came time to teach, he would goad a twitchy guy who worked with him to develop sample code. The courses were weekly, he made up a lesson plan on the morning of the course and then pushed twitchy to write the code with 10-20 min. of warning. Oh yeah, that'd be solid code.

When people asked him questions in class that he didn't know the answer, he had favourte phrases:

• "What would you think could be the solution to that?"
• "If I tell you, then you'll know."
• "That's a Perl of great price."

The students like him, because he challenged them. The college liked him because they didn't know he was full of crap. As he did this work through FoolSoft, the money went to FoolSoft then he got a cut. Towards the end of his tenture at FoolSoft, he needed more money. He was getting hammered for not paying his taxes. Technically, they weren't his taxes. Years before, he needed a job and he didn't have a social security number so rather than wait, he made up a number and was lucky enough to get one that matched the SIN# checksum. Since then, he was using that SIN# on his taxes. I told people in two levels of government about his scam. They seemed uninterested. He stopped paying taxes. So, the government pounded him for back taxes and started to guaransue his FoolSoft wages. Ever the weasel, he got some of his cheques directly from the college. The college was really comfy with separating hapless kids from their tuitions, so they didn't see a problem separating FoolSoft from its revenue.

Eventually, the dweeb fled the country to defraud people in new lands. He left behind students who needed to wrap up their course in mock Perl (mock in that they were they trying to learn Perl for real, but their teacher taught them nothing). He also left behind his "teacher's mug." This crappy mug that he got from the college in gratitude for his great service. One of the other FoolSoft founders found the mug while clearing stuff from the FoolSoft office. He took a hammer, a garbage basket and the mug. He shattered the mug over the garbage can (even while angry he was tidy) and proclaimed, "There's your fucking teacher's mug."

The lesson to be learned? Tech colleges have good courses and bad courses; good teachers and shams. I haven't heard of the former in either case, but they-- like the loch ness monster and the gunmen on the grassy knowle-- probably exist. In the above case, the college scammed the students by hiring an unvetted teacher. They left the course with paperwork, but no job skills. Indirectly, the college scammed those future employers of their graduates. They scammed another company by siphoning money from the teacher's employer to direct to the teacher. Would I hire a graduate from this college or one of the many colleges like it? Sure: as a janitor.

tags : tech colleges Perl teaching CDI

How to Kill Your Company With A Hammer And Nail

"Let's set-up an office!" It's the cry of a business that is either ready to move up from a home office situation; or it's the cry of a business that's in trouble: like a couple in trouble who have a baby to shore up the relationship.
We started after a couple of events: first, we had office space-- space that no one used. Then we moved to the only space that was available: one of the partner's grandmother's basements. Remember that line from the William Shatner Saturday Night Live skit: "Move out of your parent's basement!"? We went the other way. Well, one day I went to the house to pick up mail. No grandmother. No sign of where she was or what was going on. I didn't have a key to the office and no way to get cheques, bills, etc.. I had a dark epiphany: our entire company-- our fledging empire-- rested of the aged shoulders of an elderly woman. So, I panicked and started looking for office space.
The problem with office space: it costs money. I began to work out options. One option was to find another company in the same state. That I found. They were willing. I talked to a training company from out of town that wanted a presence in our city. They were on board.
We scouted out office space at the same location where one IT company and one print company had died. Ah, that felt cursed enough: time to proceed.
We got this dizzy building plan that was partially the design of the retarded guy who launched this move; validated by the apathy of the others. It was going to make the most of these cool twelve foot high ceilings and have this cathedral like look to it. Who was going to build it?
Volunteer labour is worth everything you pay for it. When the partners were polled to help, there was this creative spark, this burst of ideas: how do we say, "we don't want to work on it?" People were somewhere else doing something else whenever the work needed to be done. People who had no part in the company turned out to the be the most enthusiastic. Try to spin that one. People who had nothing to do with the company were bright eyed and bushy tailed. When they asked where the partners were, I had to shrug and offer up lame excuses. Volunteer labour also meant that the quality of work was random. One worker had a difficult patch of construction on his birthday-- his forgotten birthday. He took out his frustration on that wall with a hammer and screwdriver. That was probably better than taking it out on his elderly mother and frigid sister.
Meanwhile, the square dance of avoidance dragged out the office renovation from weeks to months. Our business partners were totally willing to help. Their employees would show up for whole days of effort. Some of them showed, walked around and said, "I thought you were going to do this yourself." Sure. Why not? You take care of your business. We'll take care of your new office. When I called to work out details with the out of town training company, they thought we would be giving them the space, the computers and the training and all they had to do was collect the money. Thanks guys: you need to learn a few things. So did we: get everything on paper, so you can pull out that paper when people weasel out on their agreements. The property management firm weaseled out of their side of the agreement. They agreed to give us rent relief in exchange for the renos. Nice deal: we were doing the work for free. So, for $5000 in supplies, they got $20,000 in upgrades.
While this was going on, the rent bills continued to mount up. The company lost one productive member before the office reno debacle. The office debacle tied up the other one. While he was working on the office, nothing got done for the company. No billing = no revenue. No revenue = no business. Everyone showed up to give us work: flower wholesalers, the federal government, two political parties and more. Sorry: we're to busy swinging a hammer to carry out IT work.
It was only a matter of time. The cathedral like design meant dank, dark halls. Spending six months in renovation hibernation meant that there was NO money coming in. The "run and hide" approach to volunteering became comfortable. So much so, that no role in the company was being fulfilled by the end, we had an office (sort of); a lot of bills, a lot of administative headaches, and no business.
The business died. We were out of cash and out of work. People were pissed that we took forever to complete our assignments. We worked out a painful exit strategy. The clients went away. We got out of the lease. I took on the expenses of the renovation (good bye credit rating). A year afterward, I returned to the office. I expected someone would have torn down our walls and remade the space in their own image. Instead, they left every thing as is, including our company logo etched in glass, surrounded by boxes and crap.
Whenever I hear a business thinking about building their own location, I think of them as doomed, like engineers who go into a reactor core to prevent a meltdown. They might succeed, but more likely they'll get a lethal dose from the construction. Our office turned out to be a coffin for our company, sealed up with a hammer and nail.

Commies vs. Foolsoft

How a bunch of communist hacks set out to wreck a software company.

Mr. Weiner's Christmas

Internet romances are great. Someone who can't get sex from people in town puts out an all-call to the world and voila: some pathetic sod shouts back.

"Hello-llo-lo-o! No one will have sex-ex-ex-x with me here-ere-re-e. Can we bump distant uglies-uglies-glies-ies?"

Foolsoft's founding wiener tapped the Internet and fished up with Australian chick. She was a combination doctor/show-off/slut. You know: could write a dissertation with one hand while fashioning a dildo out of a Foster's can with the other. She came out here to grate and annoy. She was really condescending and I always thought: "Don't be so smug: we have running water." and "At least 1-out-of-6 of our babies don't get snatched from under passed-out mothers and get whisked away by dingos."

That whole adventure was so fruitful that Mr. Wiener, tried to get lightning to strike twice. He culled this chick from Chicago. While we were furiously trying to get code written, he was on IRC. When the phone bills came in, there were hundreds of dollars in long distance calls to Chicago on the Foolsoft line.

It was all hot-and-heavy. Mr. Wiener was in the middle of crippling Foolsoft. That meant there wasn't money to fly his weinerdom out to the windy city. Ms. Chicago had to come out to see Mr. Wiener. Wiener tapped relatives for money to pay for carpet cleaning, groceries and spending money. Mr. Weiner's smug alert went from haze to full hazard (do not expose to kids and the elderly): "Iii've got a girl coming in from Chicaaaaaago. All you've got is a girlfriend here. Ha ha ha. Your girlfriend is ugly. Mine is a baa-ay-aa-AY-be."

Ms. Chicago was coming out for Christmas. What a nice present for Mr. Wiener. His hovel was resplendent with the improvements paid for by others. The day of Ms. Chicago's arrival came. Mr. Wiener drove out to the airport to pick up his latest Internet conquest. Her flight came in, the passengers disembarked and eventually the plane filled with new passengers. No sign of Ms. Chicago. The next flight came and left sans Internet girlfriend. And so did the next one.

Turns out Ms. Chicago spent a month or so yanking his chain with no intention of ever coming out. Merry Christmas Mister Wiener.

Piss off the Post Office

"I Know Oracle. Bow down before me"

Foolsoft Roll Call

Time for the FoolSoft Roll Call! Without these icons of IT, your company may actually succeed.

Money Man - He likes the idea of the computer industry. Why not? A shelf full of computers hit him in the head and the bigbox store gave him a big cash settlement to keep it out of court. Armed with money, we gathers together all of these technical people. They would confuse him at parties so he thought they would be ideal employees.
Best Trait To Bring to FoolSoft. Snap judgements. He'll listen to all the arguments (read: one argument) and spring into action.
Specialist Prick - He knows one things really well. In most cases your specialist prick will know one part of IT inside out (networking, PHP, Linux, Oracle, etc.); he may also have a second specialty-- keeping his job. He'll keep everyone in the dark about what he's doing. When it's too late to fix the problems he makes, he'll flee. Even if he could teach someone his specialty, he won't do that. He'll keep it all nebulous so that no one can look at his work and call, "Bullshit!"
Best Trait To Bring to FoolSoft. His specialty is his strong suit. How he leverages his strong suit in the work place makes him the model FoolSoft employee.
Twitchy Guy - Maybe someone poked him with a stick. Maybe the delicate nature of his genius makes him ideal for the job but wrong for life amongst the humans. You name it, someone made the twitchy guy so twitchy. He makes everyone uncomfortable. He feels like a old dynamite. You think you're going to set him off, so you think it's best to say nothing.
Best Trait To Bring to FoolSoft. The emergency. Eventually someone will find him walking around his neighborhood naked or will he will try to drown the mother he lives with. Then his FoolSoft co-workers have to rescue him, console him, tighten the straps on his straightjacket-- whatever.
Surly Tech - He's probably brighter than the Specialist Prick and more stable that the Twitchy Guy, but you'd never know it. He'll keep his knowledge to himself like a Microsoft application or a Linux help file.

You ask, "Should we format the hard drive?"
He says, "Yes."
You blank the hard drive and find out later that there was a better solution and say to him, "What if I changed the config file so it reads, '0.2'?"
He responds, "That would fix it, too."

Best Trait To Bring to FoolSoft. His ability to do his work at the expense of everyone else's. Usually Surly Tech gets put into the sysadmin role. There he can merrily delete files, shut out access and down servers.