Don't Give Me Any Static

At some point, I know, this post will see the light of day.

That's okay.

This entire blog is

meant to be therapeutic, but if someone else should happen to see it...oh, well.

The point being, you really have to be careful what you write these days. In fact, you have to be really careful what you Tweet, blog, Pip, e-mail, text, etc. Used to, if you wanted to send a message, you used a carrier pigeon or the Pony Express.

Nowadays, if you as much as think a thought, something's going to transmit it to the entire world in a nanosecond. Yet, we still have to wait an hour to get into a doctor's office we made an appointment to see.

This is way off track.

So a company I do business with is changing its product line, forcing me out of business with them.

That's fair, I suppose, since they're holding all the chips, and I am a mere player at their table.

The aggravating thing about it is that the pot on the table has been shrinking exponentially since the company changed the name of the game, and refused to re-market it.

Customers fell off (surprise!) and revenues have literally been cut in half over the past 10-months.

So now they decide to just clean house, blaming their customers for the loss of market share--never for once acknowledging they're the source of the problem in the first place.

A comment attributed to one of the company's local executives was passed to me today, to the effect that this operation could do as well by offering nothing to its consumers, as keeping the current crop of customers on line.

That's pretty insulting, when it's the company's decision to allow the business to fail through its own attrition.

Yes, these comments are veiled.

If you're reading and you don't understand, you're not supposed to. If you are, and you do, and you're part of the problem, shame on you for your profligacy.

You dim-wit.

I Won.

I beat you.

You tried to cheat me, you lied, you stole from me.

Then you tried to make it look like something I had done wrong.

I called you on it, and I won.

Maybe I didn't win as much as I would have liked, but you got zip.

And considering the ridiculous claim that you made, that's satisfaction for me.

Neither one of us can talk about it--so this is all I will say.

But I won.

You know it.

I know it.

And that's all that matters.

Hurry Up and Wait

I do business with a company that has offices in every major city in America. The scope and size of this organization is simply VAST. So much so, that getting things done, arriving at decisions, and making things happen is generally an exercise in patience of the nth-degree.

Sometimes, it's just an exercise in futility.

One of my customers wanted to make an announcement of a new feature involving the company described above. It's always good to toot one's horn, but even better if you can get someone else to honk about you, too.

Of course, there's always boilerplate and legalese, and signing off on intials that have initialed sign-offs. Sometimes it takes 6-months to order a pencil; you could write it quicker with a box of burned matches...

So a request for proper protocol and nomenclature was sent up the chain of command of this mighty corporate operation on behalf of my customer.
They were all out.
Couldn't be bothered.

We'll get back to you.

My customer seemed not to sense the gravity--or the glacial nature--of the corporate giant, and released his news without their input. Too bad.

This same corporate sloth recently re-branded one of its products, which affected my business, and all other businesses doing business with this business.

Did they allow weeks upon weeks before changing course?

Did they take their time in steering their behemoth onto a new heading--which would have given the rest of us ample time to make changes to pitches, documents, affiliation marks, etc.?

Of course not.

We were given less than a week's warning...AND at the last minute, the company also changed the presentation form of their product. The transition was a train wreck.

Next time they ask me for something...I think I'll take my time. They can hurry up and wait.