Most of the time I write code for businesses that do not use it. More specifically, I write custom management reports that the client pays for, and then they never bother to print out the report ever again. Oh, sometimes they do print them, but then there’s usually some sort of unpleasant political shoot-out in a staff meeting, and everyone forgets about the report, or about running the business, as they concentrate on power grabbing conspiracies whilst backstabbing each other in the front office.

However, I have had a few clients where my programming actually did something. This was because they had web sites, and my code ran web pages visited by their customers. One particularly zany client ran, I guess you’d call it conventions, and the web site provided their customers with; times, dates, answers to frequently asked questions, and contact information.

OK, so we’d had a pretty successful business relationship for a couple of years. Then the chairman retired and there was a major shake up in the board of directors. Shortly thereafter I started receiving emails from management whining about turn around time on programming, 24 hours between request and functioning code was apparently too long, and cost. My special rate of 1/3 the industry standard was apparently too high. I think that there were also implications that someone’s son in law, or nephew, could easily perform my programming tasks… And faster… And at much less cost. I may have mentioned that I’ve been a consultant for a pretty long time now, so you didn’t need to hit me in the face with a carp. Once anyone mentions how you’re now in a bidding war with board member’s in laws you pretty much know that your termination notice is on a word processor somewhere having the punctuation corrected.

At the beginning of January my new contact with the company sent me a frantic email from where ever it was that she was enjoying her vacation. Seems that for 7 or 8 months no one on the new management team had noticed that the web page providing vendor information didn’t include an application form that potential vendors could download and fill out. The web site had never provided this form before, but apparently everyone at the last board meeting had agreed to posting the form on the web site, and then using the site as the only way for vendors to acquire said form. This grand idea was passed by unanimous vote, but then everyone forgot to tell the programmer about it. So for more than half a year customer service had been telling vendors to visit the web site to download the form, but there was no form to download. Now my handler was emailing me from, Hawaii, or New York, or Grand Forks, or somewhere, that I needed to get moving on this project immediately.

Of course, since she was out of town, the vendor application in the form of a PDF file was on her computer at work, and she couldn’t email that to me until after she came home, but that wouldn’t stop me from starting work on the project today… Right?

I pointed out that the project consisted of me typing the message “Click here to download the form??? and then linking to the PDF file. But I didn’t have the PDF file, and wouldn’t have the PDF file until she returned from vacation. So there was no way that I could start on the project until she gave me the file, when she came back from vacation, in 3 days. This was followed by a lot of grumbling about cost, and turn around time, and how my uncooperative attitude wasn’t appreciated. Man, I could practically hear someone typing on that termination notice somewhere. So I wrote up a very formal memo explaining how this was the first I’d heard of the much needed changes to the web site, how I indeed wanted to make the much needed changes, but how making the much needed changes would be physically impossible until she provided me with the PDF file. Then I emailed the memo to my contact, and Cc’d everyone above her in the company.

By the end of the week the company’s new chairmen had sent me an official email informing me of our “diverging approaches??? to the web site, and explaining that they wanted to “move in a different direction??? with the assistance of “in house experts.??? So I was out on my ear. This was the middle of January.

Round about the beginning of February my former contact manager emailed me with a list of programming changes for the web site. I politely replied that all the requests were simple and straightforward, but that I didn’t work for them any more and perhaps my replacement should be making the changes. Well, it seemed that the new programmer, who was in fact someone’s; husband, boyfriend, son in law was a very gifted programmer, but he hadn’t quite figured out how to make the company passwords work yet. So could I please make the changes, and bill them under the following PO number.

So halfway through February I was at the gym and bumped into my former client’s Host Provider. He was the guy who owned the physical disk drives on which the web site lived. He told me that he’d been the target of increasing efforts to penetrate the security of his customer’s web sites, specifically the web site of my former client. Seems that around 5 different people had attempted to talk their way into system administrator privileges on the web site. Well, person number one was the new programmer. That was OK, except no one had introduced him to the Host Provider. So for all the HP knew a complete stranger had called up, asking for full access to the web site. Naturally, the HP said no. Then a second person called. This was my former contact at the company. Except she was a new employee, so the HP didn’t know who she was either. Then he started receiving angry email from three other people. Except these three other people were all the new chairman of the board, sending email from three different addresses (Last name, First name, Nickname) so that she appeared to be three different people. By now the Host Provider was certain that the site was under a concerted phishing attack to breach it’s security and he was denying all information requests from people that he didn’t know. A brief discussion as to just who he knew at the company revealed that since the management shake up there was no one he actually knew in a position of authority at the company. Except for me, and I was a consultant who had never been an employee, and they’d fired me a month ago.

So I sent an email to the Host Provider, and Cc’d the new management team at the company. I suggested that, now that the HP knew who they were, things might be easier for them. I also indicated that this past inconvenience was actually a testimonial to the Host Provider’s security consciousness. I didn’t mention that it also indicated a phenomenal lack of common sense on their part. I then coyly suggested that in future the chairman might consider sending email to her vendors from only her business address, and that she might not want to use her nickname if the recipient had never heard it mentioned before. What was she going to do? I’d already been fired for more than a month.

Well, they kept assigning me new projects for almost two and a half months after they’d fired me. I kept emailing replies with the opening statement, “But I don’t work for you any more.??? This didn’t seem to make any difference. Somehow, now that I’d been fired, my prices and turn around time seemed to be far more reasonable than was the case when I was actually working for them. Finally, we had a grand argument over the relationship between event dates. They wanted me to implement a cut off date for applications to a convention, and I kept asking what the relationship was between the cut off date and the actual convention. An angry vice president eventually told me to stop wasting time. There was not now, and never would be, a relationship between the cut off date for a convention and the date of that convention. I then pointed out that there simply had to be some sort of relationship between the two dates. For example, the cut off date had to come before the convention. If there was no relationship between the two dates, then some years the cut off date for a convention would come before the convention, and some years the cut off date would come after the convention. Since the cut off date always had to come before the convention, then there must be some sort of relationship between the two dates.

Then they fired me, again. Or maybe I had to quit, but they definitely don’t call me any more.

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