About eight months ago, I left the insurance company I worked for to sign on with a technology start-up. I went to bed that Friday in 1958 and woke up Monday in a 1999 Worldcom commercial. Except the Asian broad from Oklahoma’s an ex-Spetnaz officer who’s heard I’m a drinker and constantly offers to vodka me into a hospital stay to prove that I’m not. Plus, the foosball table takes quarters so we don’t play for too long, and we all know that our stock options are not necessarily any more valuable than Powerball tickets. Powerball tickets that you have to work 65 hours a week for four years to buy.
Generation D indeed. D for drone. Or maybe dumbass.
Working for a tech start-up seven years after the dot-com implosion is a lot like working for a Paris McDonald’s. Our potential customers hate us out of the gate because we’re not French like they’re used to dealing with. Plus, they complain that Big Macs don’t have the horse meat they like (Although they might; the guys who designed our Big Macs got fed up and fucked off to work at KFC a long time ago).
Most of the people who wander in see our mostly-empty dining room and tell us that they’re willing to try a Big Mac, but only if we give them one to try for free, and promise to replace the special sauce with their Grande’ Mere’s one-of-a-kind bechemel sauce recipe that she was buried with in 1977, and have it ready by Wednesday, and give them five bucks if we can’t get it right on time.
Which is fine if you’re actually working at McDonald’s, but unfortunately, you can’t secretly jack off into a customer’s software. God knows I’ve tried. That’s why I sit in the back corner now, but I digress…
The McDonald’s / start-up analogy falls apart when it comes to the sales staff. At McDonald’s, if someone comes in and asks for a Kobe beef burger, the counter kid’s authorized to tell him to fuck off. If a start-up’s sales guy worked the counter, he’d send back an order saying that the customer wants four chicken sandwiches, but he wants to use them to replace the four flats on his Hummer.
So we’re in the back for 36 straight unshowered hours trying to figure out how to vulcanize a McChicken, while our counter guy’s with the customer at the Ritz Carlton bar, buying him Johnnie Walker Blue with money out of they till and trying to convince him that $80,000 is a completely reasonable price to pay for four chick-wiches because a $60 flatbed tow truck might scratch his spinner rims.
Which means we get an email from the kid’s Blackberry “reminding” us that we need to mount 17-inch rims on those sandwiches or there’s no sale.
So if you’ve been wondering why things have been so quiet around here, there you go. I’m off to work now, but I promise to write again as soon as I get home. So until then, have a great Thanksgiving.
[tags]tech start-up, Web 2.0, software, dot-com, McDonalds[/tags]
