little cat feet

A slight life disruption....

When it rains it really pours, doesn't it???

Last week I found out that my biggest client is moving most of his business elsewhere, because elsewhere is cheaper. Now, there are all kinds of ways of handling this situation... let's just say that as far as I can tell he has handled it in close to the most integrity-free way possible. It could have been worse, but not by much. For one thing, telling me at the last minute shows not only a total lack of respect for me, and concern for the fact that he knew this would turn things upside down here, but also a lack of trust. What did he think I was going to do, abscond with his data? Take the old site down before he was ready? I have no idea, but I do know that it says more about him than it does about me, because I would not do *any* of those sorts of things.

So what am I going to do now? I'm really not exactly sure. In the short term, it means working a whole lot more hours than I used to, and scrambling to find more work if I'm not keeping busy enough. In the long term it really means looking at the whole thing and deciding what I want to do. This has been a great business to be in because companies have been willing to pay a lot for high-quality hosting, but those days are going away. I'm not entirely sure I want to run a business that needs constant feeding, in the form of a steady stream of new clients. If it comes to that, it might be time to go back to working for someone else. But I'm not sure yet.

This does mean my plans to move are on hold, at least for the moment. Even though I might be able to rent out my house for more than I would pay for rent, even in NYC (keeping in mind that I'd be paying the same or slightly less for a studio apartment there that I pay for a 5 bedroom, 2500 sq ft house here), I'd still be risking losing my tenant and having to make both payments for a while. Probably not a risk I should be taking right now.

More as I figure it out... the next few months should be very interesting, probably in the Chinese curse style.

Celebrating Men???

Last weekend I went to a course called Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women. I'm not sure I'm either celebrating or satisfied just yet, but it was an interesting course.

The basic idea is that we (women) tend to judge men by comparing them to what the ideal woman would do, but they are not women. So we criticize and poke fun at all the "stupid" things men do, when sometimes they are not stupid at all, just not the things we would do.

There were various strategies shared for getting men to do what you want - not of the manipulative variety, but more the right way to phrase requests so they appeal to a man's natural tendency to want to do things for us, instead of sabotaging ourselves with our word choices as we so often do.

We aren't allowed to share our class notes, so I won't go into more detail, but as time goes by I may share some stories of having tried the techniques and how well they worked. I can already say that I've had some success with this in getting a certain person who often doesn't reply to email, to reply to the ones that really matter. That's progress already.