It’s been like this for most of civilized history. Know anyone with the last name Miller? Five hundred years ago miller was a job description, not just a name. A miller was someone who ground wheat to make flour. Have any acquaintances named Smith? A smith was someone shaped metal for a living, making horseshoes, repairing iron pots, and so on–a blacksmith. So a toolmaker named Tom might be known as Tom Smith. His son would probably become a smith, duly inheriting job, name, and social standing.

If you were named Tom Smith and you were the village smith, you had better be pretty good at what you did. There weren’t a lot of other jobs around. You would be gossiped about if your work was subpar. That’s why you couldn’t just decide one day to be a blacksmith, hang out your blacksmith shingle the next day, and hope for the best. You worked as an underpaid, overworked apprentice for years, with little concept of job security or comfort. After years of what was literally (in the case of working in the smithy) a trial by fire you would eventually be considered by your employer and the rest of the village good enough to strike out–feeble pun intended–on your own.

At this point you’re probably fighting the urge to nod off. Hang on, I’m getting there. The link in my mind between your no-doubt reasonably high tech job and the plight of the village smithy is profoundly obvious. The days of the high paying, union-protected, cushy job with lax attendance requirements, a lifetime pension after 20 years and Congressional-style medical benefits are over. You’re in the same position as Tom Smith was back in 1608. He had to work every day as if his survival depended on it, because he wasn’t a member of a union with lavish benefit packages and locally powerful union bosses.

Companies are running much leaner these days. And they should be! Do the math! Suppose you’re 25 and make $40,000 a year. When I was a kid in the 70s lots of 25 year olds made that kind of money on the auto assembly lines. After 30 years on the job they could retire with a pension of at least $40,000/year and medical benefits beyond that, because with seniority and overtime they’d be making more like $120,000/year when they retired.

But what’s the life expectancy of someone who turned 55 in, say, 1995? At least another 20 years. Multiply that by $40,000/year plus another $10,000/year in medical benefits, and you’re talking a cool million for what is by definition someone adding no value to said factory. A million bucks. Back then companies like Ford and GM each employed hundreds of thousands of people. Think of the financial hit they took when thousands of people a year were retiring. Who paid all those benefits?

You did, if you bought a car. By now GM has to bake thousands of dollars into the price of each car they sell to pay for the benefits of the legions of retired workers. Buy a $22,000 Chevy Malibu next week, and think about how if it were a Toyota a car of the same quality would cost maybe $20,000 even after the punitive taxes we apply because it’s an import.

If you still don’t care about this issue, personalize it. Imagine you scrimped and saved and took on extra part-time jobs for 20 years to finance that neighborhood coffee shop you’ve fantasized about for so long. Now imagine how you’d feel if you hired a manager after three years of 110-hour weeks, and that manager demanded a benefits package that included a million dollars in benefits after retirement.

We are on a rapid course back to the future, where we once again must fend for ourselves. It is the only sustainable path to economic recovery. You have a direct responsibility to your family now. You have to become the best person for the job. If you aren’t, someone else will be.

We’ve accumulated enough savings to survive for a year if I lose my day job since that little fiasco. I could in theory slow down. I’m not going to.

Because one of the lessons I learned was this: always have a backup plan. Since I was 21 and got my first real job, I’ve always been studying at night for the next one. Despite having made substantially more than average for most of the last 25 years, I have always studied for my next gig.

(I admit there was a three-year pause. I was a program manager at Microsoft for Visual Basic, a computer language. It was my dream job. At night I was writing articles for magazines and studying Visual C++, another Microsoft programming language. Starting a job at Microsoft is a stiff challenge. It is time-consuming. It is stressful. My wife put up with this for a while, then one night gently asked why I was studying Visual C++. “So I can be ready for the next job” “But why did you study before?” “So I could get a job at a place like Microsoft… Oh, wait a minute….” Long pause.

I stopped my preparation for a few years. However, when I quit Microsoft and bought eSnipe I went right back to the same schedule. Because what if something happened to eSnipe? This had some painful and unintended consequences I will address in a later post.)

I’m working on the next business while you’re watching Lost and updating your Facebook page. I don’t know what Farmville is, but the new product is in fact making sales while I sleep.

What’s your backup plan?

It’s not as fun as it sounds. I had this problem when I bought eSnipe.com, which when on sale on eBay 10 years ago. Forty grand will always be a lot to me, but it was a good chunk of the retirement fund back then. That was the number my wife and I decided to risk on the purchase. It was the very lowest point of the first dot com bubble burst. All I knew about eSnipe was that I liked it, and that the owner had posted a few honest remarks about troubles with the site on the home page, and suddenly there was a low-key announcement about the sale.

Usenet posters at the time thought it was a hoax. Perhaps they didn’t understand the depths of the market crash, and at the time any site run so well seemed like it must be a multimillion dollar corporation. It wasn’t. It was run by one very smart, very nice, slightly overwhelmed Web pioneer whose hobby had run wildly out of control.

I didn’t know that when I read the eSnipe home page two days before auction close. All I knew was that we had to make a decision so fast that we had to recognize it might be a scam. There was no time for the kind of due diligence one would normally allocate to an investment of that size. But that’s…

Tip #1: Never bid more than you’re ready to lose.

One thing I knew was that I had to learn more about the current owner: take the measure of the man. And fast.

Tip #2: Create a relationship with the seller.

Get the seller’s phone number. Ask hard questions (with the kind of politeness and respect you would like were you the seller), both via the phone and via email. If you aren’t satisfied by an answer, drill down. If you still aren’t satisfied, move on. I greatly respected the fact that the previous owner was willing to say he didn’t know something instead of making up what he thought what I wanted to hear. I talked to him several times over a period of two days and got lots of great information that he couldn’t put in the auction listing.

These days you have another option: getting the important points in print, even if they weren’t made part of the auction listing.

Tip #3: Use the eBay messaging system for any questions of material interest to the sale.

If the seller tells you on the phone that something is in mint condition and that’s a substantial factor in its sale price, then ask for a confirmation through the messaging. This gives you a paper trail. Another option is asking the seller to use the Q&A format on the auction page.

Tip #4: Be willing to walk away.

Easier said than done, I know. Very often on eBay we are pursuing hobbies we are passionate about.

My best house negotiation was when we decided to move for no other reason than we wanted a change of scenery. It was during the last real estate bubble. Because the move wasn’t necessary, I could look as long as I wanted, and sellers couldn’t manipulate me the way they could if it were, say, for a job relocation or because I needed a cheaper place.

I fell in love with the house.

Yes, I know you’re not supposed to. Prices were supposedly going up every day (my Spidey sense was tingling, though, and I was right. We bought at the peak. Luckily I drove a hard bargain and the house has never gone underwater) Still, at all times I forced myself to be mentally ready to find another one if I felt negotiations went off track. The same was true with eSnipe, but for other reasons: I kept it at arm’s length emotionally because the sale was announced so abruptly, and with so little fanfare. I had to be rational because I didn’t have time to fall in love with it!

Keep in mind that millions of items are listed on eBay each day. There is no serious competition for eBay anywhere in the world. It is everyone’s first choice for selling things like cars, electronics, musical instruments, or collectibles on the Web. Chances are, no matter how much you like that 1936 Mickey Mouse watch in such beautiful condition, another one will appear in the next few months. Step back, be honest with yourself, and think very hard about that likelihood before you get tempted to overpay.

Tip #5: Snipe the bid (place it just seconds before the end of the auction)

I use eSnipe to make the bid because you can change your mind anytime up to 5 minutes before the auction and cancel the bid, a luxury you do not have if you place it on eBay directly. eBay makes it hard to retract bids, for some very good reason (mostly related to fraud control). You can have your cake and eat it too by placing the bid with eSnipe instead. Because we don’t hit eBay until seconds before the auction close, you can always cancel the bid without eBay ever knowing should you come to your senses about that Mickey Mouse watch.

Trivia item: About 20% of eSnipe bids get canceled.

One obvious tip is to avoid sellers who insist on weird, off-the-books forms of payment or who need a cashier’s check overnighted to them. They should accept any form of payment familiar to most eBay users.

Bonus tip: Anytime you get even the merest hint of a gut feeling that something about the seller just isn’t right, pull out of negotiations immediately.

Remember, falling in love with something on eBay is dangerous. In every sense, put the Golden Rule to work. If you were a seller and accepted checks, you would of course want the check to clear before you sent the item. So don’t expect the seller to mail out that 1959 Fender Stratocaster until your check clears. On the other hand, if you were selling something expensive, you would surely accept escrow, PayPal, even a visit from an impartial third party.

Tip #6: Use PayPal if at all possible.

The bad news for sellers is that PayPal is pretty much a “guilty until proven innocent” operation on their side of the transaction. Which means that you, the buyer, wield a heavy cudgel. Buyers can return anything for just about any reason and PayPal almost always makes the seller eat it. Not really fair for sellers, a boon for the purchaser of an expensive item. Beware sellers who avoid PayPal because of the 3% fee. Sure, it’s more than one would like, but sellers who nickel-and-dime you may not be the kind you want to trust with your money in a major purchase.

Tip #7: Use an escrow service, especially if you don’t have the protection of PayPal.

I have used escrow.com a couple of times and it went well. They’re especially good for intellectual property items, such as domain names or websites. Less good for, say, guitars, because all they can assure is that the item gets delivered to you. They don’t help you in judging an item’s quality as compared to the seller’s description.

My $40,000 purchase went swimmingly, even though there wasn’t even a Businesses for Sale category back then. eSnipe supports our family well, and I’ve met lots of wonderful people over these last 10 years. Even now I browse eBay for businesses, but carefully. Seven years ago I dropped $10K on an awful charm bracelet site and lost another $8K trying to make it work. Five years ago I bought a $7000 DVD site and bungled that too. (What was I thinking?) At least both transactions went fine because I stuck to the principles listed here.

Have you ever made a big purchase on eBay? Tell me all about it, either in the comments or, if it’s compelling enough, in a guest post.

Ex 14-Year-Old Tells You What to Do

I was 14. Kids at school were watching “Love Boat”. My neighbors were getting into drugs and worse. My parents, incredibly, buried their heads in their sand and simply hoped their jobs were safe, even as our neighbors lost good jobs forever. I was going to the library and reading the then-meager literature on how to succeed in business and personal life. (The two often march hand in hand.) My parents hated it, and did their level best to pretend it was a phase I’d grow out of. Sorry, Mom and Dad, wherever you are… I still haven’t. Money’s important. It helps protect your children, especially in bad times. It means you don’t have to spend winters putting pots under leaky holes in the roof the way we had to. It can also be fun to make.

I made my first million by 40. I’ve made more millions since then (lost plenty, too). The story has been different from what you might expect. One of my goals with this blog is to tell you what I did wrong, so you won’t have to, and what I did right, so you can do better.

Why Listen to a Guy Who Didn’t Buy Google at $90?

Many of my mistakes stem from what turns out to be my greatest strength at this inflection point in history. Because I was always gearing up for hard times, I didn’t take full advantage of many opportunities I encountered. When the economy soared in the late 80s, I figured it would crest by the early 90s. Fail! It meant that my developed tolerance for risk-taking was tempered by my expectations of a dip that didn’t really occur for well over another decade.

On the other hand, I’m in a pretty safe position. I have several houses all paid off, I have a couple of paid-off rental properties, and I don’t have any debt beyond the mortgage for our main house. (Why not pay it off? More on that in a later post.) Plus I have enough cash in the bank to live on for a year if my day job goes south.

This isn’t bragging, because believe me, the path has not been without rough patches. Nor is it an accident. I am here because I’ve been ready for it since 1975. Maybe you made a few bucks on Amazon or Yahoo! or AOL during their respective meteoric rises. Not me. I didn’t understand how their P/E’s could remain so high. I wasn’t the guy to listen to in 2005 when Google went public. But if you want ideas on how to prosper in these lean and dangerous times, I’m your guy.

Learn to Steal from the Best

One thing I did right was continue to study good business practices. I did it to steal ideas, and also to accumulate material for other people who wish to start a business but don’t know how. If you have any business ideas you’d like to discuss or need help on, post them in the comments. I love talking business!

We live in the Seattle area. It has not been hit nearly as hard as Detroit or even California, but it’s been hit. That has made the continuing success of many of my acquaintances even more impressive. The unifying thread is that they are all providing high quality products and services. I know a psychologist who specializes in testing children. These tests aren’t cheap. They can hit the four-figure mark quickly. She literally is barely aware of the recession. I asked her business was down. She didn’t know. I asked her office manager. “Oh yes”, she said. “Our waiting list used to be four months long. Now it’s only a month.” I’m sure many of us would love to have a 30-day waiting list for our high-end business. Heck, I don’t even have an office manager, now that I think of it!

I go to the coolest little gym. It’s priced the same as the meat market gyms, but it’s a high-end studio with only 3 rooms, one per person being trained, one trainer (sometimes two) per customer. They’re so busy they can’t hire enough good people to manage demand. What’s their secret? Sensational service. They’re personable, knowledgeable, and know how to handle the kind of edge cases that simply won’t get dealt with properly in a gym with 500 customers and two personal trainers.

There’s an amazing restaurant called Poppy in Seattle. It has one of the most original (read: hard to sell) menus I’ve ever seen. Poppy isn’t cheap, yet they’re full every night. The food is incredible, and the wait staff are all top-notch.

Many small banks have weathered the housing disaster using a super secret ninja financial technique. They didn’t loan money to questionable characters who couldn’t prove sufficient income or provide a real down payment. Did you know that very, very few homeowners who put down 20% on their houses defaulted on their loans? Surprise!

If You Were Fired Would You Hire You?

What is it that all these parties doing right? They’re doing everything right, that’s what. Hang on, don’t click away in disgust. It has direct meaning in your life even if you don’t run a business. When I taught myself programming I chose a career in creating programming languages. Compiler theory is considered by most programmers to be one of the most technically formidable disciplines there is. Why did I do it? No degree, that’s why. I figured I’d better be pretty good at programming, or I’d lose jobs to people who’s resumes looked better because they had degrees. I learned something hard but I only had to do it once. It helped me for years.

You may not be an entrepreneur. Doesn’t matter. You should act like one anyway. Think hard. If you were fired tomorrow, would your employer do better or worse? If you can’t honestly answer “worse”, then it’s time to rethink your career plan. Now be even more honest with yourself. If you were your boss, would you hire you? Are you so good at what you do that you’re a no-brainer decision for your next hiring manager?

If the answer isn’t yes you know what to do. Either start working on your backup plan or improve your “customer service”, that is, make yourself indispensable. Or both.

1. Build from scratch in HTML.  Puh-lease. This is 2010. I knew there had to be something better.
2. Hire someone else to do it. Overpay them, get crappy results, and whine to my wife that there has to be a better way. Been there, done that, annoyed the wife.
3. Figure out how other people are learning how to slap together great-looking websites so fast. Bingo!

I took some expensive courses in internet marketing and found out everyone at stage 3 was using WordPress. If you’ve only heard vaguely about WordPress you know it’s a blog, but at this point in its career WordPress is a general purpose website builder made infinitely malleable through the use of plugins. You can change the site’s looks dramatically using free (or paid) themes. There are well over a thousand of them available at the WordPress site, and they can be used commercially too. Other, “premium” themes are available at a price elsewhere.

The problem with WordPress is that it’s a big piece of software. As with all such software, I knew that most of the time you only need 5% of its capabilities. I didn’t know what made up that 5%. When I finally learned it, I decided to create a detailed, lavishly illustrated step-by-step guide so that you don’t have to learn the other 95%. I now use that very guide to build complete websites quickly. They usually take much less than an hour to get up and running. My 11-year-old daughter did it in far under an hour.

More later but if you want to check out the sales page see On the Web in an Hour. You can get a free taste of it here. I will arrange a discount for eSnipe users during some as-yet-determined introductory period.

I’m interested in your reactions to the garish sales page, which internet marketers assure me is the best way to make sales to casual visitors. On the Web in an Hour took me a lot of time to create. I’m not sure it’s the best way to present a serious product.

When I typed "I want to buy" into Google, it offered me choices like Monkey, Live Ostrich, and Island

If you think you know what people want to buy online, you’re probably wrong. Here’s what happened when I typed “I want to buy” into Google.

I have hurt a couple of friends and broken commitments these last few months because I simply have no energy or desire to get past the basics. By the time I’ve got the three kids off to school, done a load of dishes, done a load of clothes,  and worked out, dealt with accounting and lawyers, I was until last week pretty much done for the day. That was at least an hour before lunch was even a possibility. Suddenly things that normally wouldn’t get me down triggered unseemly amounts of pity: having a retarded child who seems impossible to toilet train, dealing with insurance personnel for another medically challenged child, sleep problems, the deterioration of a middle aged body, being hit by the IRS, my heritage of addiction, keeping the kids up with their homework… things I have handled just fine for years suddenly seemed like burdens.

I don’t smoke or take any illicit drugs. I can’t have caffeine because it keeps me up all night no matter how early I have it. I had also had to reset my sleep patterns and become a morning person, after years of keeping rock star hours. Up until a couple of days ago all I wanted to do was nap by the time the workout was over. That meant a full-on crash with nothing to catch the fall, because the much-desired siesta would shatter my new, fragile truce with the alarm clock. I don’t want to watch DVDs, I don’t want to surf the web, I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone, nothing. I just want to sleep. Since I can’t, it’s just waiting for one second to saunter into the next, deciding whether I should curl up into a fetal position, fantasize about Olive Garden salad dressing, or just whine.

At this point you’re no doubt completely without sympathy. You are no doubt observing that at least the poor little rich CEO gets to work at home and won’t get fired if his  productivity hits the floor with a whump, as it has the last few weeks. You’re right, it could certainly be worse. But man, I felt like crap for a long time. I still have days where just reading my email is triumph.

I have been experiencing what can only be described as severe withdrawal symptoms from eggs, milk, cheese, and oil, with my body working full time against this effort by throwing every possibly obstruction in the path of my diet. A number of skin conditions suddenly flared up. I had headaches all day for weeks, headaches that didn’t respond to over-the-counter painkillers. When my wife would fry something, it was everything I could do not to fly into a rage.

I became Mr. Hyde most of the day, snapping at nuns, little old ladies crossing the street, puppies, unicorns, and my poor defenseless children for offenses ranging from the trivial to the downright nonexistent. At times I was crushingly tired by late morning yet not allowed to nap. My last remaining comfort used to be taking hot baths and reading, but hauling my great overweight bulk out of the bathtub when it’s all done strains my wrists, causing stress injuries that last for weeks. So that’s out. It’s one thing that I can’t have candy, Mountain Dew, or cheese. I can’t even take a damn bath.

And the food. Fortunately my wife is up to the hour of labor-intensive chopping, dicing, grating, and no-oil stir-frying food preparation needed to get me through the day, so I am lucky in that I seldom have to prepare it. For all the trouble required to make these meager dishes, it is sustenance and not often enjoyable. Because it has no added fat, I am often full, but never satisfied. Two months into the diet, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that I will seldom enjoy a meal for its own sake. I managed to gain weight the first three weeks because I just wouldn’t stop eating in hopes of somehow beating the system and actually feeling good at the end of a  meal. End result: Bloat, but no satisfaction.

The book I read descibing this diet promises that about 12 weeks in, you start to not miss fat. Maybe that’s so, but it glosses over the extreme discomfort one can endure during those agonizing few months. Starting yesterday a green shoot of hope emerged from the wasteland. I stopped jonesing for peanut butter. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll start looking forward to apple and leek wraps.

“Who’s this?” the person demanded, after a longer-than-expected pause when I answered the phone. “I’m Tom Campbell,” I said. “How can I help you?” “Oh, I thought you were a recording,” she explained, speaking with unself-conscious, exaggerated care. I told her I get that a lot. There’s something artificial about the way I answer the phone, maybe sort of overmodulated. Not really sure what I can do about it, but sorry.

Another pause.

“I’m trying to reach eSnipe,” she said a bit belligerently. “Who’s this?” A little weird to be the this in “Who’s this?” Why not just ask who are you? Who’s this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whatever. “I’m the CEO,” I replied. “Is there something I can help you with?”

At this point just insert inappropriate pauses at random mentally. I’ll stop detailing each one. There were just too many.

“No you’re not,” she said slowly, maybe carefully.

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t be. You’re not the CEO of eSnipe. Are you?”

I assured her that I was the CEO.

“That’s bleeping amazing. Really? You answered the bleeping phone, and you’re the CEO? I don’t believe it.” She wasn’t really using the word “bleeping”, but this is a family blog.  ”There’s a problem with your site.” “Happy to help you, but if it’s a support issue I’m the wrong guy. I don’t know how to use the support software but our people are really good. They usually get back to you within a few minutes during the business day. What seems to be the problem? If it’s an easy one I might be able to point you in the right direction.”

She veered right back to the theme that seemed most comfortable to her. “You answered the bleeping phone, at like, what time of night?” “I think it’s about 10:30 here in Washington state.” “Wow. I mean, no CEO ever answers the phone, and not at like 11:30 or whatever. Is it really that late?” Ah… Yes.”Do you know your phone number is published like that? Anyone can call you. Do you want to be doing that?” “I don’t mind. People like you pay the bills. I figure anyone clever enough to track down my phone number probably has a good reason. What’s the problem?”

“About what?” she asked.

This time the pause was mine.

“Um, you said you had a problem?”

No answer.

“You called me a moment ago, and asked if I knew the problem was with my site.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, suddenly chipper. “That’s cool. I don’t even remember it. I’m drinking a little. I still can’t believe you answered your phone. That’s bleeping outrageous. You are so bleeping cool. I can’t believe you thought of a business like this. I love it. I love how people can, you know, take an idea and run with it. It’s bleeping brilliant.  You’re like, an inventor or something.”

I allowed as how I hadn’t thought of the idea. I just bought the business, almost 9 years ago at this point. ”But you… but you… that’s OK, even if you didn’t invent it, I never would have thought of that. It’s a bleeping great site!”

The conversation wore on like that, and eventually I discovered that even an ego as gigantic as mine can live without the sugar rush of compliments from someone who is not only stoned out of her gourd, but who has a memory span approximately three sentences long. I tried to steer the conversation back on course, and hit upon the obvious. Even drunk, most people can talk about themselves fairly articulately.

Most people.

“What do you use eSnipe for?” I love hearing why people use eSnipe. The answers are fascinating much more often than not. After the requisite pause she said “I’m a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control.” “Most cool! And what does a researcher at CDC buy on eBay?” “Well, I don’t want to get personal. I don’t really feel comfortable doing that.” But you felt comfortable drunk dialing a stranger, forgetting why you called, and spending 1o minutes telling him how bleeping brilliant he was?

As the conversation slid downhill I pondered options for terminating it, then realized that subtlety would not be required. “Well, I appreciate your calling, and if you ever do figure out what it was that bothered you, feel free to email me at the same address where you found my phone number.” “Oh yeah. Where did I get your number, anyway? I still can’t believe how bleeping cool it is that the CEO would answer it.” “It’s my cell phone, so I pretty much always answer it. Thanks for calling and don’t forget support next time!” Somehow it worked and she hung up happy.

All in all, not as interesting as the porn star who called me the first year I took the reins at eSnipe, back when I did in fact handle all support. At least Dr. Inebriate’s call didn’t result in a threat of dismemberment from my wife.

Customers forcing companies to do the right thing…

Now let me turn the tables. Let’s talk about customers who try to force companies to do the right thing, even when it’s wrong. This one was right in my own back yard.

It has been over 8 years since I did routine technical support at my day job, but I purposely leave a few back doors open for customers who are determined to reach me. It is quite possible to get hold of me on my personal cell phone within 30 seconds of visiting my site. Although I am no longer able to handle support requests, occasionally customers ring me up, sometimes with odd results.

The most recent case was a customer who found an extra $3 charge on his credit card statement that appeared to be initiated by us. It had a cryptic, footnoted description and came after a routine charge he agreed with. For reasons of privacy he wasn’t willing to send me even a redacted portion of the statement, and had trouble describing how it appeared on the statement. I immediately suspected it was some kind of charge by the issuing bank that had nothing to do with eSnipe, and asked him to call them. He had. He said they couldn’t identify it.

I was still pretty sure this wasn’t an eSnipe-initiated charge. He was equally sure it wasn’t the bank’s. I told him I would issue a check for the amount of the charge, not pointing out that doing so would be immensely cheaper than handling this as an escalated support incident. Here’s where we get back to the titular theme of this post. He refused to accept the refund I offered for a mistake we hadn’t make. He did it on the very American grounds that he wanted to make sure that other customers didn’t have this problem. He would rather forego my non-refund refund in order to get to the bottom of the problem and ensure that eSnipe wasn’t doing this to its other customers.

Since we handle hundreds of support incidents a week, and I am in frequent contact with the support team, I knew this wasn’t the case. It was an anomaly. The customer kept me on the phone for an hour as we tried fruitlessly to diagnose the problem. Finally he hung up, promising to call the bank. I did the same, because my merchant account vendor happens to be his bank too. I thought I’d call our rep and see if the bank could help figure out his problem.

…even when they’re wrong

While on hold somewhere in menu hell, I got a call back from the customer. He had called the bank a second time, got through to a different person, and found out that it was indeed a charge issued by the bank and not my company. The culprit was weird formatting problem in the way the bill was printed. From what I could tell by his description, the bank had imposed a new fee on him, and didn’t start a new line when it was added as a line item. It came right after the eSnipe charge by coincidence, and thus appeared on the same line as the description of our fee.

But here’s what we can all learn from these shenanigans

There’s a deep, meaningful lesson in all this, I’m sure. I just don’t know what it is. The lesson I want very much to get across to you is that sometimes it’s okay not to force someone else to comply with your ethical code. I can’t do that, though, because even as I was in the middle of this frustrating and vaguely comical experience, I knew that I have been that same customer. I too have tried to make companies I patronize make systemic changes when I knew customers were being treated improperly by them.

Yet here I was, The Company this time, not treating the customer at all badly, and not being in the wrong. Yet any possible defense I raised would sound like stonewalling to the gentleman I was serving. After all, it was right there in black and white on his bill! A charge with our name in front of it! How on earth was I supposed to manage the issue if he didn’t believe this incident was unique, yet he wasn’t willing to send me a scan of the relevant portion of the bill to assist him?

In the end I simply had to remind myself that the customer is sometimes wrong. More about that later.

Here’s an example of a presentation I just created using 280Slides:

280Slides is different all the rest because despite its beta status, it is the first in-browser app that feels every bit as slick as a desktop app from one of the big guys. It doesn’t have PowerPoint’s massive, industrial-strength feature set. What it does include, however, is what most of us need 95% of the time we make presentations, plus a few extras. My favorite features are:

• Unbeatably simple integration with SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high-ranked site in seconds
• Awesome text editing
• Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
• Even has Speaker’s notes
• Supports the Google Chrome browser
• Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument (the one thing that didn’t seem to work in the beta)

This is the most mature early beta of a product I have ever encountered. They hit the sweet spot between size of feature set and ease of learning. Only Apple manages to do the same thing the first time out, and only in their iPhone and desktop apps, certainly now browser apps.

Browser apps can’t save files to your computer. It’s a security risk. 280Slides gets around this problem by silently saving files to its own server. I don’t know what the maximum you can store is, but my PowerPoint decks are usually pretty small. Its publish to SlideShare.net feature has the simples signup process ever. It’s the same dialog as used to log in, so if you don’t have an account it just asks you for the password a second time (the confirmation step) and creates the account on the fly.

Though many would prefer this not to be case, most slide decks are just bullet points. In an upcoming post I will defend this widely reviled convention, but for the moment let’s just accept reality. This means if you’re going to create slides, editing the text on them should feel comfortable to users of desktop apps. If you’re not a programmer, you may not appreciate how big a challenge that is. Browser apps have to be small, because they load every time you visit the web page. WYSIWIG text handling is very hard to get right under any circumstance, but doing it well in a browser has thus far eluded every major developer I know of. I didn’t blame them.

Another area where web apps understandably lag is Undo. It’s not as nasty to implement as text editing, but it’s not pretty, either. 280Slides

In my view 280Slides is the first browser app to get so close to the supremely elegant handling of text boxes characterized by PowerPoint and Pages that you don’t miss the desktop apps. Creating a good presentation is hard and you don’t want to feel like you’re fighting the software just to jot down a few bullet points. 280Slides make it a dream.

I haven’t been this excited about a web app since Google Docs hit the scene. I can’t wait for 280Slides to finish the few features it hasn’t baked in yet, so I can try creating PDF and PowerPoint presentations. Highly recommended.