Recently in Personal 04 Category

Gotta love hosting.

I'm sitting in Toronto, typing on what seems like a Portuguese computer, trying to tire myself out enough to sleep. I made the mistake of moving the middle schoolers to Every Week from the enshrined Every Other Week. And all their parents said "Praise be to God, the One who gets these monsters out of our hair".

I don't have that many. One of them, whom I will call Lara, told her dad to pick her up at 4. She could have simply called her dad and asked to be picked up at 3:30, our usual time. Instead, in great middle schooler fashion, we all decided to stick around until 4.

So I took them out for Squishees at Family Express across the unbuilt lot. Then we sat around the table and "chilled" or "hung out" or did whatever it is that they call sitting around doing nothing with someone. Well, Halley and Caleb (not their real names) flirted with each other a lot. I try to keep it from becoming deadly or from ruining the carpet. It normally involves some form of liquid being thrown, mostly Halley to Caleb.

It's the end of a dream that I never really wanted: I am turning down even their counter. I could have gone on the CEO track. Might've made a few million by the time I was 60 — which, according to this month's Atlantic Monthly, might be necessary to survive the downturn that's hitting America for the next thirty years. And I'm turning it down.

It's always a bad idea to take a job that no one, and I mean no one, has been enthusiastic about. Not even Alan, mostly because it really isn't in NYC.

I analysed the job myself and put together a timeline. The company currently is a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) of computer hardware and consumer electronics. Low margins. High volumes: US$150M. In order to successfully have an outsourcing component, I would have to convince them to extend their footprint into the current customers. It's no good to try to do software services when you have no experience offerring such. You look at the computers going in and you ask what services could you sell on top of those, services like configuration, load design, depot staffing, desktop replacement services, desktop management. After proving your competence here, you then move into the software services market, again with your existing customers.

Just so that my life is not any easier and my innate indecisiveness will continue to cause me trouble, they have countered with a different proposal.

Well, maybe I'll get some consulting out of this.

I was invited to come to New Jersey Saturday for the day to interview about a job running a new subsidiary of a US$150M company. It went well, but much more quickly than I would have liked it paced: I got an offer by the end of the day.

I was excited, of course: I've only had two offers since leaving INFOSEC back in May 2003, and both to run someone else's company. The other one fell through in part because the money wasn't there but too far in the future. There was some money involved in this, but less than I made at INFOSEC, at least at first. Even if I met the US$2M income target in the first year, I would still make less than the base salary of the software architects I used to work with. And this in a more expensive part of the country. The relocation funds would be spotty, and I would accumulate a few thousand dollars more debt to get out there. Should I meet a US$20M annual target five years out, I would get a 5% equity stake in the subsidiary. The job involved creating a company to sell Indian software development services to American companies, but that was their entire vision. And they had no experience in software development.

So it wasn't a spectacular offer. You know where this is going, don't you?

Almost two years after losing the job at INFOSEC, I get a real interview for a real job that has real salary. Even if it's with a startup. Thank goodness they went and talked to a recruiter that we both know. A job as COO of an IT outsource company with money behind it, good people in front of it, and an opportunity to travel to Bangalore and Delhi.

So, I leave tomorrow to spend the day in Newark. Beautiful Newark, New Jersey, home of . . . um . . . a little help? Home of crime? Last time I was in Newark — admittedly more than ten years ago — a friend of mine had married a gal we both knew who was at the Metropolitan Opera Academy or some such and they were living in the International House near Grant's Tomb. Newark was, to be polite, a cesspool, at least from what I saw. Fast forward to today and she burned her voice out singing on broadway, they've moved to KC where he writes novels and teen comedy screenplays and she Mommys and works as a church music minister. I'm minimally employed so some things are the same, but I'm not single so some things have changed.

But still: this job's in New Jersey.

I've been meaning to write something up here, mostly just to keep my habit of typing. I've been lost in the Content Management System universe lately; I'll summarize my findings over at Echo Software this weekend, if you are someone who cares. I'm put together a pretty decent method for using Mambo to run a church website. I'll write that up and post the files to mamboforge.net as manasclerk. It can go with my old work, except I'll probably make it donationware: you use it, you have to donate to one of my causes. Or pay me personally twice as much if you don't like them. One of them is always the Salvation Army, for whom a pal in Belgium works, so most folks don't usually have a problem.

But what was I moaning about? Oh, yeah, why I haven't put anything up.

Well, I've been in darker moods than usual lately. Considering my usual, that's pretty bleak. I'd call them George Bailley moments except I don't have life insurance. Like I can afford that any more.