Wed Apr 10 19:36:34 2002

A lot has happened since then.

The owners son, a complete idiot who never finished high school and made my life miserable by always giving me hardware integration jobs that were physically impossible after selling some dimwit customer on said solution, tried a completely idiotic coup AGAINST HIS OWN FATHER that totally and completely backfired.

He's gone, along with his co-conspirators.  Recently my manger, a complete incompetent who tried to steal the company's intellectual property and sell it to other companies, was fired as well.  We got a new sales guy who is actually intelligent (my manager hated him) and the lead programmer can now talk to me DIRECTLY about our project, which will rid us from depending on shitty DVR software for EVAR.

Oh yeah, and I have my own desk and phone, and I don't have to take the majority of tech calls anymore, because another guy has taken that on, with training from me.

Today, our lead programmer spent a full hour explaining the details of tagnuts for the software he has written, and showed me how to integrate changes in the interface with QT designer.  He's even willing to teach me a bit about O-O programming, and he lent me a cool book on Cocoa development, the dev tools for my iBook, and showed me how to log on to Darwin in text mode on my iBook (freaked me out seeing white on black text fullscreen on the iBook, but it was pretty cool)

We talked about BSD versus Linux versus Mach/Darwin and dissed Linus Torvalds and talked about geeky stuff.

Today I get to take my L33T skills making aqua buttons and translate them into a full mockup of the GUI for a trade publication.  (Eventually I'll be skinning the UI directly in QT designer)  Tomorrow I'll surf the web for more BSD versus Windows promotional marketing propaganda, ie, basically Battlefront-level stuff.  I get to update the web site directly instead of going through three levels of management bullshit, and I report directly to the President and owner of the company.

And this is my JOB!

Which goes to show, sometimes sucky situations can slowly turn around to being great situations, if you have patience and are smart.

Wed Apr 10 19:42:15 2002

[size=24][color=red]Hurrah[/color][/size]

</Paul Hill>

Wow, that indeed sounds like it was sucktacular.  

But please, share more details.  how did the stupid son attept his coup?

Wed Apr 10 20:02:00 2002

M.

Wed Apr 10 20:25:06 2002

Wed Apr 10 21:00:46 2002

Thu Apr 11 02:14:22 2002

Thu Apr 11 02:54:06 2002

It's a long story.  You have to remember that this son never completed high school, his previous job was a stock promoter (basically phoning people up and writing messages on the internet to try and convince people to buy junk stocks)  Before that he worked at Sodas, a local diner not far from our apartment.

Now he and this older guy started up an "Internet" company selling stuff on the web.  The older guy hired the programmers to write the site and set it up, and the stupid guy did promoting, which he wasn't very good at.  His father's company needed a good web site, and so he acquired the struggling Internet company and made his son Vice President of his company, that sold cameras and lenses and VCRs and was starting to sell DVRs.

Part of the deal was that the son would get stock in the father's company, not tons, but a fair amount, like 15-20 percent or something like that.  FOR FREE.  And he got $5000 a month to be Vice President.

Sweet deal for a high school dropout, wouldn't you think?  Most people with brains would think so.

Not this guy.

He had personal issues with his father (stupid issues, from what I hear) and wanted to take over the company for himself.  The company, I might add, that the father had run for 30 YEARS.  The father was about to retire, and was actually trying to TRAIN the son and GROOM him to take over in a few years.  But does he go along with this?  NO...

He gathers three other guys (together they own >50% of stock) and tries to oust the old man out.  They go along with this... why, do you ask, would they do something so stupid?

Easy.  They were going to oust the son right afterwards.  They figured that once they got rid of the father, it would be trivial to get rid of the son, who was so incompetent and stupid that the only reason he was still there was because of his father.

What they didn't count on is the older guy who used to work with the son TELLING the father about all these plans, and then SELLING him his shares, which gave the father >50% control over the company and gave him some nice $$$.  So the back-stabbers who were going to back-stab the back-stabbing son got stabbed in the back by the son's former partner.  OH TEH IRONY!!111

Names have been removed to protect the guilty.  ;)

Thu Apr 11 02:56:25 2002

I'm happy for you Jeremy.

Thanks, Madan.  Sorry for getting you upset in my trashing-classic-MacOS thread on the BF, I kinda fell into old habits.  :)

Thu Apr 11 03:19:00 2002

So the back-stabbers who were going to back-stab the back-stabbing son got stabbed in the back by the son's former partner.

My head is spinning.  ;)

Thu Apr 11 04:56:20 2002

from Jeremy Reimer posted at 7:54 pm on April 10, 2002

What they didn't count on is the older guy who used to work with the son TELLING the father about all these plans, and then SELLING him his shares, which gave the father >50% control over the company and gave him some nice $$$.  So the back-stabbers who were going to back-stab the back-stabbing son got stabbed in the back by the son's former partner.  OH TEH IRONY!!111

Names have been removed to protect the guilty.  ;)

Thu Apr 11 22:43:49 2002

I don't get it-- the examples of greedy stupid people having their stupid little plans backfire and winding up with nothing... are there not enough examples of this happening again and again all the time every single time for these people?

Of course, being stupid might have something to do with it.  

Sat Apr 20 10:05:55 2002

Glad to see things are going better, JR. Now kindly code up independent tables and a self-updating top posters list! :biggrin: ;) :biggrin: