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self-sabotagingly tight-fisted Wednesday, June 21 2006
Today was part two of my the decline and fall of my relationship with a certain independently-operated Hudson Valley radio station. My emails had by now
reached all the way up the president of the station. This guy is notorious in Ulster County for his self-sabotagingly tight-fisted ways, and I'd been warned about him. These warnings were the reason I'd stopped working the moment E had told me I was "over budget." Anyway, today the president wrote to tell me that my ecommerce system wasn't working and it was my job to fix it for free. He explained that this is what the guy who did his floors had had to do when the floors warped even though this floor laying contractor, like me, had been working on a per-hour basis. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not the treatment of the floor guy was ethical, the fact of the matter was that the ecommerce site was still a work in progress and had been deployed prematurely partly as a means of debugging it. The pathetic four-person "web team" at the station didn't have the resources to test it completely beforehand and even if they did this would have added enormously to the number of pre-release billable hours. Basically, the president of the station was attempting to pull a fast one on me, something I'd been expecting at some point. In a series of escalations I called him out on it and rubbed his nose in his sordid reputation, some of which he'd had the audacity to brag about in meetings. I don't know if this was the most delicious fuck you I've ever served up, but it was pretty close. (The emails are available for those who want to read them, by the way.) By the end of the day I'd announced that I was no longer working for the station, leaving it to twist in the wind and figure out what to do. It's not like there are lot of web developers in this part of the world. I am eager to find out how this turns out.
I went to Lowes today and bought a bunch of dark brown stain for use in finishing the laboratory and solar decks. I also ordered a delivery of 24 sheets of drywall so I can finally finish the walls of the garage and shop area. Since getting back from Los Angeles with my fat check I've been on a spending spree. Today I took delivery of a 300 GB hard drive and a 1600 by 1200 LCD flatscreen to replace one of my two 19 inch CRTs. Up until a couple months ago, 1600 by 1200 flat screens were outside my price range (which, for most purchases, has an arbitrary cap of $400). But the Samsung 204B at TigerDirect was only $359.99. It's a great monitor, with a very narrow frame and only 36W of power consumption. It's so bright I had to turn it down to be able to see the screen of the scratched and battered five year old 19 inch ViewSonic CRT next to it.
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