Post #101,569
5/12/03 9:11:32 PM
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It had to happen.
On June 2 I will re-enter the prolitariat class (which is where I've always belonged). It was a tough call, but I think I made the right decision for me and the wee ones. WTH? Was I on crack or something? Me? A business man?
It will be good to shed the stench of "entrepreneur" once and for all. :-)
Actually, I was/am doing okay. I'm frankly just tired of the 24/7 call duty. Fer instance, this week-end the owner of a company I setup an Sql Server for called. 8 hours on the phone on a week-end because he fscked around with a DC (Win2K network) and hosed things up. I get him going again and tonight he calls me (home number) and says he's mucked things up now to the point that numbers and other ascii characters are showing up in the permissions tab for a critical share. I have slept all of one hour in the past two days and I'm just not up for this anymore ;-)
Far better, imo, to rejoin my brethren in the working class, imo. At least when we leave work, we leave it. Despite the fact that:
I work.
You work.
He/She works.
We work.
You work.
They profit.
bcnu,
Mikem
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice and always has been...We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.
- Mark Twain, "Monarchical and Republican Patriotism"
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Post #101,573
5/12/03 9:29:23 PM
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Empathy
I am sure many of us here have been through that support hell where we start our own businesses & because we believe in always looking after the customer, end up being exploited to the point of pain.
I feel for you but agree that from the picture presented, you are to committed to be supporting finger fscking customers :-)
One lesson I learned when running your own business is *never* *never* sell computers & software to lawyers. In one of a couple od cases, I had sold a Xenix based computer to a solicitor (kind of a lawyer here) & he love fiddling with Unix. I had spent hours schooling him in running Xenix commands & maintaining his computer & did my best to tell him to *always* do regular back-ups as if he got a bad block on his hard disk (which was fairly common back then) he would have to do a restore. Anyway he didn't back up (how does one instill years of discipline into heads of IT novices) and he lost everything. I tried to recover his data but he had had a block failure in the index area of the file system.
I even went as far as scanning almost every block in a 10 MB area of his disk to try & extract ascii data that we could reconstruct data from The job proved to difficult & I had to tell him it was a case of severe bad luck.
So then he decided to sue me. He alledged I had sold him a computer with a faulty disk (this was 18 months after the sale). After paying good money to hire my own lawyer I finally got him to drop his case as being unreasonable & unwinable (I was the country expert on that brand of computer & would have been able to deflate his case).
Anyway that plus 2 other incidents with lawyers sure taught me who to place at the top of avoidance list (lower down are the finger-fscking customers :-).
Anyway - good luck.
Cheers
Doug Marker
Spectres from our past: Beware the future when your children & theirs come after you for what you may have been willing to condone today - dsm 2003
Motivational: When performing activities, ask yourself if the person you most want to be would do, or say, it - dsm 2003
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Post #101,579
5/12/03 10:08:11 PM
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Exactly
You cannot take the risk of doing business with lawyers unless you are a lawfirm. They will either sue you or not pay their bill and invite you to sue them. Leave them to legal specialist firms that have lots of lawyers of their own.
Doctors are also a problem, not that they'll sue, but they're simply incredulous that anyone but a doctor expects to be paid higher than minimum wage. If you're firm with them, and they still deal with you, they can be very good clients. You just have to get them to conceptually lump you in with suppliers of (always horribly overpriced) medical equipment, rather than with employees.
Both doctors and lawyers like to screw around with the equipment. They think expending their own $200 to $400 per hour time is a good deal, because that consultant is so expensive.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #101,656
5/13/03 11:25:30 AM
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Lawyers and Servers
At the law firm I used to work at, the Lawyers or rather the Partners had Administrative access. From time to time they would mess with the permissions, giving group Everyone read/write access to everything. They would do this to like the man web server, and then someone would load an ASP script inside of Frontpage and mess everything up. Then we had to fix it. I think that is a reason why it took me so long to get things done there, but they never took that into consideration when my annual review came up. I spent a lot of my time cleaning up someone else's mess.
"If you're going to cheat, cheat fair. If there's anything I hate it's a crooked crook!" -Moe Howard
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Post #101,576
5/12/03 9:54:21 PM
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Aren't you charging double rate for weekends and off hours?
I have one client who calls me whenever he pleases and expects undivided attention, but he pays any invoice I send him without question for that privilege
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #101,587
5/12/03 10:32:21 PM
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Someday.. you've really got to write That Book
Seriously.
While much might appeal to the technically ept (and be more fun to write) - the 'moral' of lots of these little stories would not be lost on any semi-literate person (well.. 'cept the Nintendo-Eloi maybe).
Bonus.. the same principles as apply to, "How to ask a technical question.. if you actually want an answer" might be the edjaKayshunal byproduct of a certain number of hilarious counter-examples (!)
Just a thought,
Ashton
How to behave smart, when you don't know shit - and pretending is no longer working.. [sub-title?]
Inquiring minds want to scream
Arkadiy
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Post #101,588
5/12/03 10:35:03 PM
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I always charged a higher off hours rate
and billed every second portal to portal. After a couple of those bills they usually wait until monday. I love lawyers as clients, after a quick explaination of how the law differs from IT and the first argued bill results in no service therafter at all, they are pretty good about it. "you dont feel you owe part of this bill? Thats fine pay the balance and we are even." Next call I get it is " sorry, I never service a client who ever disputes my bill. good luck in your future endevours" To me accountants are he worst. They understand computing enough to really fuck them up and dispute every tick of the clock.
thanx,
bill
will work for cash and other incentives [link|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html|skill set]
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
Carpe Dieu
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Post #102,141
5/15/03 5:23:05 PM
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Egads! I just noticed.
I can't even spell prolEtariat anymore.
bcnu,
Mikem
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice and always has been...We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.
- Mark Twain, "Monarchical and Republican Patriotism"
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Post #102,144
5/15/03 5:29:03 PM
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'tis OK, we knowed wot ya meaned.
[link|mailto:jbrabeck@attbi.com|Joe]
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Post #102,148
5/15/03 5:56:58 PM
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That's how you tell if you belong .
If you can't spell it, you'll feel right at home there.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #102,293
5/16/03 2:26:26 PM
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Good one ;-)
bcnu,
Mikem
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice and always has been...We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.
- Mark Twain, "Monarchical and Republican Patriotism"
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