My Thursday
Okay, I managed to survive my visit to FreakBoss without too much mental anguish. I arrived at 1pm but, as usual, he talked and talked and talked on the phone and to people dropping by the office. Around 3:30pm, I almost put my plan into effect. I was going to make my cell phone ring and pretend there was a client on the other end who had to meet before catching a plane. As I was about to do it (I had the cell phone at the right screen), he scheduled an apointment with someone for 4pm. Okay, so I figured I’d be there another 30 minutes at the latest.
Shortly after that, he called the credit card company he had signed up with to do ecommerce transactions to find out how I am supposed to set up some silly order form on a couple of his sites that hardly anybody uses. (More on that in a bit.) We were on hold for 15+ minutes. He was wandering the office, but luckily returned before the guy answered. (I had no idea what I was supposed to ask the guy and would have just told him to wait a second, I guess.) So the guy pointed us to the web page that had the information we needed and that was it. I checked out the web page to see how the system is supposed to be set up. It’s actually really simple. I probably should have made it out to be really complex. Oh well.
I ended up leaving around 5pm when that guy finally arrived. As I’m leaving, he asks if I can have the stuff done “by the end of this week”.
“Um, the end of this week is tomorrow! No.” …and I left.
Anyway, at one point while he was busy screwing around, he showed me his web sites’ stats. (They’re generated by a really lousy program that analyzes the log file and craps out colorful, yet meaningless graphs.) He was pointing out how one of his sites got 50 hits yesterday! (One that has 3 frames on the home page…so, with graphics, that’s probably 10 hits from one visit right there.)
He’s convinced that this is the “lots of traffic” that will get people pouring in to pay $3/month + $10 setup for an e-mail address at his lame .com domain with 5Mb storage space. Heh. Highly unlikely. (He originally had 3Mb, but I said, “$3 for 3Mb? That’s not much space…plus a few large e-mails would easily clog that right up! Disk space is supposed to be cheap.” …so he only ups it 2Mb. Whatever, you dumbass.)
Seeing how religiously he checks his stats, I’m glad I’ve never linked to his sites from here or mentioned the (stupid) domains. Him finding this page would be BAD!
Oh, and he was also trying to talk me into writing up a “web development” section for his hosting/domain registration web site so that he could sell my services through that (and take a hefty cut, I’m sure.) No. Not gonna happen.
Anyway, I got paid what he owed me…except $20 he said he didn’t have on him. I’ll probably just cut my losses and let him keep the lousy $20. (Hell, I have to pay $4 or $5 in gas just to get down there and back.)
They installed security cameras since the last time I was there. There’s a split-screen monitor in one room (where he normally sits) with all of them up at once. In the several hours I was just sitting around, I noticed that it was possible to get in and go to the server cage without appearing on camera once. You’d just have to enter from the rear. I mean…DUH! You’d think they’d point at least one at the rear doors or at the server cage itself. Instead they have one pointing at…of all things…the bathroom door.
…and this guy’s a part time cop? I’d never have guessed.