Monday, November 22, 2004
Raining, Pouring
So on top of a dying mail server, many other things to do, web sites to create, personal stuff like the car to tend to, and a bad situation I caused by attempting to be overly helpful to a departing client employee…
I got a call giving the opportunity to bid on a job upgrading a law office in Brockton to accomodate several additional people moving there from the firm’s Boston office.
This is the same Boston firm that had a failure of their lone server and then couldn’t restore documents and templates from backup after it was reinstalled. I met my partner there to try to help them, and after a nightmare trip on the T following other obligations making me late here, was half an hour late. We did everything right to try to recover the data, couldn’t make it work, and suggested a data recovery firm as the next likely option. My partner was mad at me for being late and underdressed, so he volunteered that we wouldn’t charge them anything for what would have been two billable hours in all, a half hour of which took me 2.5 hours of time on the T, to and from, to incur. I’m still mad at my partner for that, even if it was three years ago. I’m not sure I’ve looked at him the same way since. Then they had someone else come in, do exactly what we did, and it worked. That was embarrassing, even though that kind of thing happens.
But I digress. They’re moving in January, so after the holidays I will need to talk to a guy in Boston, arrange to go see what the setup is now, then see what it’s currently like in Brockton, and figure out what they need to do and propose accordingly.
It’s kind of funny, the lawyer I spoke with thought it might be to small for me. Not at all.