The emotional cost of business
Conciousness of Business
Some would argue that most business men and women have no conciousness or have lack a lack of any moral standards. Is this so with all business owners and other “upper” professionals? What is the emotional and moral price of succeeding for most business owners? These are some questions that I hope to answer or come to understand in this posting.
The delima
The company I work for is an ISP that offers telephone technical support and if you bring in your computer we’ll do all kinds of stuff to it for free (see How far should an ISP go). The problem with this is that we shouldn’t be doing half of the stuff we do for our customers. Anyway a customer of this ISP called up because they could not get their wireless AirPort router configured and installed properly. They couldn’t get on the internet with it. Since I didn’t know the first thing about Apple’s AirPort, or Macs in general I stated that none of us really know Macs that well and have never setup an AirPort router. I was in a mood all day long, of screw this job, I wish my business would take off. Because I was in this mood, I mentioned to the customer that, while we have no expierence setting up an AirPort, I am sure that if I were to make an on-site call that I could get it configured and working. I gave some hints to the customer on what I thought might be the problem. I also told them that some of us do onsites on the side and that if they couldn’t get it with the hints I gave them (remember I have never setup an AirPort either, I gave them hints on what I suspected to be wrong) that they could call back and I would make a visit that night when I got off of work. They agreed and about 30 minutes later the customer called back and wanted me to do the onsite call. I agreed.
All is fine, but…
All is fine and well, I print out a Google map and the customers IP address information for their DSL and tell myself not to forget to swing by there after work. 6:00 rolls around and it is time to “clock out”. I grab my bag, map and customer information and head out the door. A little nervous that this is a Mac customer but I am confident that my networking skill will prevail over the OS specific rhetoric of System Preferences and Control Panels. I arrive at my new clients home and knock on the door, I recognize the face from working at my current job. We exchange hello’s and we walk back into the office where the computers are located. The first thing I realize is that the laptop is already connected to the wireless network. The TCP/IP settings on the desktop was not properly configured and neither was the internet side of the AirPort (we use static IP addresses on our DSL circuits at my ISP job) and the customers IP address was not correctly configured in the AirPort. Easy enough, just go into the AirPort Admin Utility and configure it. So I do. It starts working and the people are amazed how fast I got it working.
Somewhere in between getting it working and walking out the door I realized I never even looked at any of the wireless security settings to see if the laptop was capable of WPA. If the laptop was capable I wanted to setup WPA for a little bit more security. Ok, no big deal. Security really isn’t that important for a small home network considering it really is just as safe as moving any data over an unsecured website. My only concern with no security is that war drivers may stuble on it and “steal” their internet. Again not that big a deal, I’ll just email the customer and say that I would like to come back out and see if I can get wireless security working for no charge.
Once I tell myself that I’ll just email them and offer to go out again with now charge I remember another ISP customer earlier in the day that had a Windows XP box with a Linksys router. Well this particular customer was having a bear of a time getting his new WRT54G v5 router setup and working. This was one of those bring in the router and computer and we’ll setup your wireless network (again, see ), but this wireless network wasn’t working and I fielded several calls for technical support from this guy. I finally broke down and said that I would swing by in 5 minutes, while still on the clock at my ISP job, so I couldn’t charge the guy. Turns out that the router he bought had a “Static IP” bug that when you restarted the router it never assigned the proper IP to the WAN port until you went into the web configuration and “re-saved” the configuration. It then took off. I updated the firmware and the router still acted the same. I advised the guy to take the router back and buy a different model. So I went back to work and he went to buy a new router. After he purchased his new one he swung it by and I set it up for his DSL circuit and enabled wirless security (something I didn’t do in to the AirPort above). So I effectively setup this guys wireless network for free, while another client I charged to go to thier house and setup the same thing.
My conciousness
When I finally got home and walked in to kiss my wife and children, it hit me. I realized I had setup one guys wireless network for free, and charged another $50 for the same thing. I felt like shit. I actually got depressed and told myself I was going to give them back the money. I didn’t even setup wireless security for the people I charged. Shame on me. How could I do this to these people. They were extremely nice and very friendly. Now that I think about it, both parties were extemely nice. But it would have made me feel better if I would have charged the other guy too.
Resolution
Is there a resolution to this problem? An answer to my conciousness that is testing my moral character. I am not sure if there is a solution or not. I should learn from this experience and take head to either go after onsites all the time and not do it unless I do it after work and charge everyone, or just cool the jets on pursuing my business until I can quit at SYIX and do my business full time, that way I would have to charge everybody and not have to be “chained” to charging certain people because I did it “off the clock”.
Another resolution, which I cannot control would be for my current employer to stop provided services for free that people should be charged for. I don’t see this happening due to the fact that my employer has to do this or else all the customers would leave because they are over priced.
I hope this does not make me sound greedy. I don’t feel I am greedy person. I am just trying to make ends meet a little better for my own wife and children. My problem is that making a miserable $24,000 year at my current job and not getting a raise since I was hired nearly 2 years ago is hard on a family living in California of all places. If my wife did not hold a full time job with excellent benefits (even though her pay is less than mine) we would not be making ends meet in the run down, small, old house we are renting now, and we would be stuck living with my parents and younger brother in a cramped 3 bedroom home. Oh, I forgot to mention the day care for our children that goes up every year regardless.
Richard :: Jan.05.2006 :: Personal Thoughts :: Comments Off