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Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Brains can suck-or-how NOT to be a successful consultant

RUSTIN'S SELF PITYING RANT
Tonight I reached yet another threshold in this odd life that I've committed to.
For those who haven't wandered through my posts, I'm currently spending most of my time starting a company. In a certain sense I've been preparing for this almost all of my life. In the fifth grade (which would be, what, 1977?) I was saving reference material that I thought would be reproducable without copyright problems.
Yeah, I was a weird kid. It's part of why (as I'm reluctantly now admitting to myself) /. is starting to mean so much to me. On /. I can preserve at least the illusion that there is a whole community of people out there who each care about operating system philosophies AND renewable power generation AND private space capabilities AND industrial organization AND political reform/hacking the legislative process.
Appallingly, I still feel a bit isolated as what I'm really looking for a community of people who each care about all of the above AND gender issues AND furniture/space design AND language variability AND cooking AND meditation AND comparative analysis of religion/spirituality. I'm sure that I'm skipping nine or ten issues but you get the idea.
All of which, oddly enough, brings me back to starting a company. I guess that the truth is that after living most of my life as the magic freak almost everywhere I went ("ask Rustin, he'll know"; "ask Rustin, he'll fix it"; "ask Rustin, he won't mind those hours/that duration") I'm very impatient to somehow spend my days among peers. And I'm pretty sick of being subordinate in the chain of command to people who think I'm incomprehensible/are afraid of me/think that I'm somehow dangerous/have no idea of what is involved in what they pay me to do.
Yeah, I'm writing this at four in the morning while drugged out on anti-histamines, a tiny residue of booze, caffeine, and a truly blasted sleep schedule. So I'm sure that my tone is far more self-pitying then I would usually allow, but, hey, this is what everybody says blogging is about. Stand revealed before the world! Tell half a million people that today you have cramps/forgot to feed your cat/are wearing the same shirt for the third day running!
So, bottom line, back in '96 I set out to start building a company the way that I think it should be run, balls to the wall, taking the operational philosophies to their natural conclusions, no half-hearted almost theres.
To me the moment when I knew that I would never accomplish the things that I wanted in the corporate world had come while I was working at the esteemed Sports Illustrated.
Back at another company I had gotten in touch with the folks at iOmega about this new thing that they had on the way called a Zip Disk. When the first units started coming out I suggested, kinda through my boss (I was working for a consulting firm) that SI, which had long had complicated and expensive procedures in place for emergencies, could build a much better system based on these new cheap, high-capacity removables.
Basically the idea was that (since they were all on Macs) one could create a one disk instant system config and then get drives and disks for all the IT folks. A little mobile setup kit. Should a machine ever go kaflooey they could (since most documents were server-based) get a stack of replacement machines (this was Time, Inc. after all, such things weren't a problem), boot each CPU from a CD, copy over a build complete with System folder, applications, templates, the works. No installs to run, no docs to download, Just drag, drop, reboot.
And, even better, there would be room left over for Disk Tools, SCSI Probe, TechTool, and so on so not only could the software be replaced but diagnostics could be run as a part of the same procedure.
It wouldn't be pretty, but I figured that most SI staffers could get by just fine with what we could fit on one Zip. In other words, total time from naked machine to up and running, logins and all, say twenty minutes per box.
The head of IT for SI thought about it for a while and then told my boss that this was an excellent idea, he just had a few minor changes.
"Minor". Ha, ha.
So my boss comes to me and says that I'm to get this all figured out and ready to use, but with one little difference, I'm to get it running to my original spec (i.e. twenty minutes to usability, no training beyond cable hookup required for the staffer, etc.) It's just that, by the way, instead of a Zip drive and disk, it should be on ten floppies. Oh, and if I fail, I'm passed over for promotion.
Okay, for those of you who haven't already done the math, let's go through this. 100Mb vs. 1.4Mb (minus formatting blocks) times 10. So I've got, realistically, about 12Mb instead of 96Mb. In ten little separate ~1.3Mb blocks. None of the apps are under 3 Mb so drag and drop rather than installers is flat impossible.
I'm sorry, I'm just not going to explain this further. Either you know enough about computers to see that I had just been asked to lift an aircraft carrier on a toothpick or you'll just have to take my word for it. And the hateful truth is that I've been through this ever since junior high school.
I think that all too many of you know what it is like to have your computer skills treated like some sort of indescribable magic powers. Picture being treated that way about computers and shopping and design and language and gardens and doing things on a tiny budget and certain kinds of physical work (moving boxes, walking long distances, carrying loads) and history and literature and certain parts of pop culture. All of them. Not a few. All. When that happens pretty much everybody, even if they don't mean to, stops treating you entirely like a person. You're not somebody like them; you're an appliance. And I think that it's mighty obvious by now that I've let this happen far too many times and that I'm now deeply, deeply sick of it.
And you know what? Appliances don't get paid worth a damn because when your skills seem to just appear effortlessly out of the air then people get very resentful about paying for something that "clearly" didn't cost you anything.
So I left. I walked out, did a John Galt, handed in my badge, got myself drummed out of the profession, tore down the farm and salted the land.
And sometime soon I'll explain what I've replaced it with.
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Brains can suck-or-how NOT to be a successful consultant

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