Silly Behaviour (NJM13)
Missed an entry yesterday. I have no real excuse, except there was the regular workday and I was waiting to write, and then one of the children was in a show that I was helping with the sets for – and by the time we set up at 7pm, had the show, and broke down the set at 11pm, when I got home I kind of just fell asleep.
The event was a high school fashion show, with students as the models; it was their own version of "Project Runway". That part was good for me, because at least the set design was simple – just some black drapes and a backlit white backdrop with the Project Runway logo (don’t tell Heidi Klum – we didn’t get copyright clearance to use it, and I wouldn’t want her to go all blitzkrieg on us). The setup went fine, except for some last minute problems with really old spotlights and blown halogen lamps. The show was great, the kids had fun.
It was a fun opportunity to watch high school cliques (the kid ones and the parent ones) in action. It’s funny how some people will hold on to that sort of behavior for years, and still think that being in one particular group of friends makes them better than other people.
I totally got thrown on a tangent right there, because I typed "behaviour" up there. I still do that every time I go to write that word – I also quite often type "favourite" instead of "favorite". It’s a weird thing – several years ago, when OD was still a baby, I had to work on other consulting gigs to pay the bills. For several months in 1999-2000, I worked for a UK company that was trying to develop a business-to-business goods exchange for the food service industry. All the software was being written for use in the UK, so as I was writing the interface, I had to use UK spelling for all those funny words that we Americans don’t spell right. It was a really intense project, and I probably put in a couple thousand hours work on it. By the time it was done, I was spelling all those words the UK way, without thinking about it. Some of them, like "colour", I switched back to spelling American with no problem – but for some reason, I still insert the u in "behaviour" any time I type it.
Silly English kniggets.
The unfunny part of the story is that the client I was working for turned out to be one of the absolute classic stories of corporate malfeasance during the great Internet bubble – a slick operation with some really smart people running it, that did some really dumb things. Seriously, what happened with this company would have made a great tragicomedy. Of course, to people at the level I was at (programmers and contractors), everything looked swell until suddenly one day there was no money to pay us.
The company was Efdex (for Electronic Food and Drink Exchange) – if you live in the UK, you may have seen the news stories at the time. Most of the financial trouble they got in was in the UK – the company’s footprint in the US was small enough that over here, it only really affected me and the team of programmers I was heading. The story linked above quotes a figure of $65 million that was blown – but I was told by people in the company that it was in fact $90 million of investor money that was lost.
The amazing thing was that over several rounds of fundraising, the guys who ran this company raised all of these millions, based on the idea of a service that didn’t yet exist, had no customers, no sales, and obviously no revenues. It’s hard to believe now, but in those days if you had a nice presentation and your proposed business was something (anything) on the Internet – you could get somebody to throw money at you. They blew all of it on really nice offices, cars, cell phones and laptops for everybody (when they were way more expensive), flying back and forth across the ocean – they even built a television studio in London to create content for the non-existent service.
In any case, the whole thing went ass over teakettle when they couldn’t pay IBM, who was developing the main parts of the system. IBM repossessed their code, and the company was left with nothing to show or sell – and suddenly they couldn’t pay their bills. They went into bankruptcy, owing many people many dollars – including a sickeningly large number of thousands they owed to me.
Live and learn – lots of people learned that lesson when the Internet bubble blew up back then. I was lucky, because OD was really just starting to take off then, and I had that to fall back on. If that consulting job had been my only job, things would have been way worse. As it was, I just felt stupid for having been taken – some of the best code I ever wrote went into that system, and in the end it was all for nothing. Like I said, live and learn. I’m not the sort of person that holds grudges, or looks back on the past and regrets things (because it is the past, after all – what are you gonna do?) – but the whole episode still gives me agita when I think about it.
And like I said – that was a tangent; I didn’t come here to write about that story at all, but there it is.
The DiaryMaster
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How do you know the Project Runway people or Heidi Klum don’t have an OD account? Oooops. 🙂
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I am an Australian where we spell with the UK dictionary, but as a writer, I work with US publishers and I now find myself typing flavor, behavior, neighbor without thinking about it, and then get into strife when ‘talking’ to Australian or British pals online, over my “Americanised” spelling. I deliberately spelled Americanised with an s here. 🙂
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Do you still own what you wrote?
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hm. no … i like grudges and i will hold one forever.
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Favourite, colour and behaviour are all correct. You silly Americans have mucked about with our beautiful language! We like our extraneous letters. 😉
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I agree with Icklewriter 😀
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yay for extraneous “u” type letters! 🙂
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Haha, you said ass over teakettle. I have a regular customer at work who’s about 3 days older than dirt and he says “ass over tit” as often as possible. Surprisingly, he manages to pepper it into most conversations at least twice.
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Hehe, deep down you know that spelling it with the “u” is correct :oP
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Fascinating story! I love these layers you’re showing us about your life!
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The UK way to spell things is the best way 😉 😀
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The spelling looked correct to me! How awful for you to have done all that work for nothing.
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Ummm, you actually mean “arse over teakettle” don’t you? {I am a Brit living in the States and doing my little bit for English spelling LOL}
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Wow! Things are changing ao much in so little time. I was watching the movie “milk” and the politician was going on about how you can just tell someone is gay and they had.a test… I told my husband I would be amazed if that same thing got said today without a lawsuit. (Freedom of speech as long as you’re willing to be sued and pay for it. That’s today :-p) I like these entries DM! 🙂 ( sorry for my tangent in ya notes :-p)
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I’m Canadian and we spell the UK way so spend a lot of time editing out those U’s. I’d have been really mad ( there are choicer words I could use but they are not allowed LOL) about losing all that money and all your employees must have really felt it too. You live and learn though, bet that never happened again , and you’ve done such a great job with OD too and for that I thank you.
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I am sorry you got took . I never have but proably only because I don’t money to invest in anything. The one thing on OD that gets my dander up is the grammer police and the spelling police. I have learned just to block them. Why does a few think every word has to be perfect?
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dang well live and learn as you said.. glad you had a good night with the kids though my spelling at times leaves a lot to be desired but thank goodness for spell check lmao
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When I was 10, I had an ‘exchange teacher’ from Alaska and so we did spelling his way that year, removing the u. It took me many many years to get it right and know the difference between australian and american spelling. (No one told me the difference, I had to work it out myself.) I still have trouble with grey/gray.
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You make us Aussies feel all warm and fuzzy when you spell like that… 😀
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We appreciate any stories. You might try writing at dawn? lol She says knowing you are still abed at dawn.
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i like that you said ‘agita’. no one around where i live now seems to know what that means.
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I feel like I’m getting to know you as more of a person.
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BTW, what did you name the black kitten…?
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See it as a valuable lesson learned. That’s the way I saw losing two thousand by following the broker’s advice. Willy
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Tangents can be good. It was an interesting, if painful story. The high school Project Runway sounds a lot more pleasant.
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“Knigget” is spelled with a “K”??!! It is really a question of weight ratio…
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glad the show went well. take care,
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something I always thought about since joining OD in 1999… do you sometimes go read other diaries? Do YOU have favs on here?
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Hear hear for Icklewriter! It was our language first, whst with dropping the letters. American’s admit to SPEAKING English, so they should write it too. Ass over teakettle is not one I’ve heard before. I will be storing that for future use!
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But a vital lesson learnt I’m sure.
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I’m enjoying you as a fellow diarist.
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So IBM kept the rights to their code in cases of non-payment, but you didn’t? I hope you made a copy for yourself. No, I am not going to make a French Knight joke. —
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Speaking of foreign spelling and all, given the project involved, and the threat imagined, shouldn’t you change blitzkrieg to blitzklieg? 😉
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Oh wow, now that’s a story…
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id be pissed! that really sucks. you remind me of my step dad, a programmer with a long title lol
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Its hard for me to write behavior and not behaviour. I blame Silverchair for that since they’ve got a song called Strange Behaviour.
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*keeping an eye out for Heidi for you* How creepy to be involved in one of the corporate scandals. I’m glad you had OD to fall back on. —
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I remember those days: adding a dot-com meant an instant $500 million to your business. …. with, a herring!
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I’m telling Heidi LOL Honestly do you thing Heidi would even care that a high school used her logo? Who knows? Yes leave and learn. I think we all have to learn things the hard way. I am stuggling now and it is no fun. But in the end it will all be OK.
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“Missed an entry yesterday. I have no real excuse.” One has no real excuse for beating up an old lady, for inflating an insurance claim, or for kicking a dog. One needs NO excuse for missing a journal entry.
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I don’t know. ANY saying that uses the word “teakettle” is too old for me. 😛 Eric
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Interesting tidbit about the Internet industry… ^_^
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ah! the ol’ learning curve as they say “those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it.” And huzzah for spelling like an Englishman, you make many nationalities happy by doing so. It shouldn’t really be a such a sticking point though in OD-land (UK vs US) as they all sound the same in the end. They are diaries not works of classic literature
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Aw shucks … spell how you wanna. I do. In two weeks (or in my case five min. from now) .. who’s gonna know or remember? Ain’t no thang butta chicken wang. Say whatcha wanna, when ya wanna, how ya wanna. If it ain’t hurtin’ nobody or meant to hurt somebody then so what. 😉
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I’ll be honest, I had to read the first sentence about Efdex twice…I thought you originally goofed up the spelling for Fedex 😉
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Ut oh, you’ve officially been MIA for a few days:-X
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Ok DM. Why did this show up at the top of my list? Why is this not a NEW NJM entry?? Hellooooo, it’s officially Wednesday the 18th here in TX. You are a few days behind mister!! :oP
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“I didn’t come here to write about that story at all, but there it is” Right? Oy, we start in one spot and by the time we’re done we’ve no idea where we are or where we started, and we’ve written too much to just delete it so it stays! Isn’t it called word (or memory) association? Anyhow, being a Canuck I grew up hearing/using the British terms for many everyday things like petrol for gas, crisps for chips, lorry for truck or boot for car trunk,
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