Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Stepping A Little Further Out of "Society" 1
I'm in the middle of a really hairy cash crisis at the moment. Not only have I gotten a Marshal's Notice already but I got it almost a week ago and haven't gotten to court yet to dispute it.[1] So when I tried to schedule a day with a client today to get paid the money she owes me (over a third of what it will take to get me in dutch with my various creditors) and get in what was supposed to be four to seven billable hours, I was kinda eager to have it work out.
Well, this client is a bit, well, let's say sensitive about social interaction and when I say that in this case email was the best way to be in touch and figure out options, trust me, this is no lightly reached conclusion.
So, I'm supposed to check my email at 7:30 to see if we're on. I'm also hoping to check some small but potentially helpful things (for this job, for example, some up to the minute weather data could *really* help me out). But my connection is USELESS!
In short, I'm underprepared when she calls, lose the day of billable time and won't get paid, at best, for another week and am pretty much screwed.
So I decide that, this being Sunday, I'm just gonna stay on Time/Warner's ass unitl this gets fixed.
I'll spare you the details. You've all been there. They leave me on hold for, added up, over two hours, drop me back to Level One support, lose the account log, promise to call back, don't, and so on. Throughout this, at the requests of their blockheaded "technician"s, I engage in much plugging and unplugging of cables, restarting of CPUs, etc.
At 8:30 this evening they finally reach a conclusion. My cable modem is dead and needs to be replaced. This requires that I stay home on a weekday (Wednesday is the soonest slot available), which means another lost day of billable time since my only assistant reasonably available on weekdays just quit two days ago.
So I finally go off, have a snack, and decide to at least reconfigure my setup to its normal state with hub in place so that I can print those tiny little bills that are snailmailable (thirty dollars here, a hundred and seventy there) and at least increase the trickle of dollars my way.
Well, guess what? Once no longer following the instructions of the yahoos of tech support, it took me about ten minutes to get my web connection back. Just flushed ALL my settings (TCP/IP, Appletalk, etc.), rebooted, and I was up. No reason to believe that it wouldn't have worked hours before, I had simply had so many times that my connection could only be restored by a modem reset from T/W that I had foolishly not tried every option before calling. I had restarted the modem, reset it, reset my IP address, and a few other things and had then been stupid enough to think that they would be anything but a last resort.
So, what does this all mean?
Aside from "panic and lack of sleep are the most dangerous enemies of judgement"?
I will be dropping my T/W service and replacing it with something that includes static IP. And I have now concluded that eventually I'm going to have to make the leap that more and more of you have and step up to hosting my own site, connecting to something closer to a trunk, and generally pass as far and fast as I can out of the class of "consumer" because these days to be a member of the general population is to exist to be screwed over by the handful of megacorps who hold the average citizen firmly by the short and curlies.
These days, you've gotta scale up, opt out or some combination of the two and today has just pushed me a little further down that road.
-Rustin
[1] In the future I should be able to avoid this kind of foolishness. I'm adding three hours per round, two rounds a month to have my best assistant take over all billing work and start regularizing the whole process. Gawd knows I'm close enough to the needed income levels that I shouldn't be having such troubles. But billing has been my biggest weakness for over ten years and these cash crises are pretty damn absurd for a thirty-seven year old.
Yep, it's the classic lament of the small businessman. "I've got the receivables, I just need to get the cash from their pockets to mine!"
Well, this client is a bit, well, let's say sensitive about social interaction and when I say that in this case email was the best way to be in touch and figure out options, trust me, this is no lightly reached conclusion.
So, I'm supposed to check my email at 7:30 to see if we're on. I'm also hoping to check some small but potentially helpful things (for this job, for example, some up to the minute weather data could *really* help me out). But my connection is USELESS!
In short, I'm underprepared when she calls, lose the day of billable time and won't get paid, at best, for another week and am pretty much screwed.
So I decide that, this being Sunday, I'm just gonna stay on Time/Warner's ass unitl this gets fixed.
I'll spare you the details. You've all been there. They leave me on hold for, added up, over two hours, drop me back to Level One support, lose the account log, promise to call back, don't, and so on. Throughout this, at the requests of their blockheaded "technician"s, I engage in much plugging and unplugging of cables, restarting of CPUs, etc.
At 8:30 this evening they finally reach a conclusion. My cable modem is dead and needs to be replaced. This requires that I stay home on a weekday (Wednesday is the soonest slot available), which means another lost day of billable time since my only assistant reasonably available on weekdays just quit two days ago.
So I finally go off, have a snack, and decide to at least reconfigure my setup to its normal state with hub in place so that I can print those tiny little bills that are snailmailable (thirty dollars here, a hundred and seventy there) and at least increase the trickle of dollars my way.
Well, guess what? Once no longer following the instructions of the yahoos of tech support, it took me about ten minutes to get my web connection back. Just flushed ALL my settings (TCP/IP, Appletalk, etc.), rebooted, and I was up. No reason to believe that it wouldn't have worked hours before, I had simply had so many times that my connection could only be restored by a modem reset from T/W that I had foolishly not tried every option before calling. I had restarted the modem, reset it, reset my IP address, and a few other things and had then been stupid enough to think that they would be anything but a last resort.
So, what does this all mean?
Aside from "panic and lack of sleep are the most dangerous enemies of judgement"?
I will be dropping my T/W service and replacing it with something that includes static IP. And I have now concluded that eventually I'm going to have to make the leap that more and more of you have and step up to hosting my own site, connecting to something closer to a trunk, and generally pass as far and fast as I can out of the class of "consumer" because these days to be a member of the general population is to exist to be screwed over by the handful of megacorps who hold the average citizen firmly by the short and curlies.
These days, you've gotta scale up, opt out or some combination of the two and today has just pushed me a little further down that road.
-Rustin
[1] In the future I should be able to avoid this kind of foolishness. I'm adding three hours per round, two rounds a month to have my best assistant take over all billing work and start regularizing the whole process. Gawd knows I'm close enough to the needed income levels that I shouldn't be having such troubles. But billing has been my biggest weakness for over ten years and these cash crises are pretty damn absurd for a thirty-seven year old.
Yep, it's the classic lament of the small businessman. "I've got the receivables, I just need to get the cash from their pockets to mine!"
Same boat, different sea. (Score:2)
I guess that means I'll still have cash-flow problems next year... Oh well, I'm used to it by now.
Hosting my own site is really, really nice, but the cost of having a static IP here is just silly. A regular consumer-grade DSL line (1Mbps down/256kbps up) is around $25 a month, a corp grade 512kbps line with static IP is $350. It's not so much the IP that costs, it's the