Re: Syndicomm Scam

[Eric Shepherd <eshepherd@mozilla.com>]

On 2013-04-23 00:42:00 +0000, D Finnigan said:

> Some tasks take a bit of manual effort, such as duplicating the floppy disks
> and applying labels, burning optical discs, and printing and punching
> manuals. These orders are the ones that get delayed.
>
> The download-only orders should get processed much more quickly.

Yes, download-only orders should turn around more quickly, I agree.

I think people underestimate how much is actually involved here. A few 
things you may not realize:

1. These books take far longer to print than you think. Because the're 
scans and not text documents, you don't get 40 ppm on a high-speed 
printer like the ones we use. Instead, these books can take *hours* to 
print a single copy. Originally, the IIc Technical Reference took EIGHT 
HOURS to print. As tools improved, I was eventually able to get that 
down to about an hour and a half.

2. Listening to a printer run for hours on end is really annoying. My 
fancy workgroup printer (yes, I bought a $3000 printer to do Syndicomm 
books!) sounded like a dragon eating truck that was doing donuts inside 
a jet airplane while it worked on these things. There's only so long 
you want to listen to that in a day. :)

3. If you have a day job, that's 8-10 hours of your day you can't be 
doing Syndicomm stuff. Then throw in 8 hours for sleep. Already, 
something like 18 hours of your day are gone. How much of it do you 
want to spend working on printing, copying, and shipping? :)

4. There are some rules about shipping that can make it tedious. If 
your package is over a pound, you have to hand-present it to a postal 
service employee, so you can't just put it in the mailbox. There are 
even more rules for shipping internationally.

5. Bookkeeping takes time too, and unless you're a professional or you 
love number crunching, this is a big turnoff. Of all the things I 
hadn't realized when I started doing Syndicomm, this is the one that 
sucked the most. You have to track all these orders, how much they 
cost, what the shipping was, and where they went. That's because...

6. You have to pay business and sales tax. I never charged people for 
sales tax, even though under law I was required to pay it. I took that 
out of my own pocket. But it meant I had to keep very good records.

7. You probably have other things Apple II related you're doing. 
Certainly I was trying to make time to write code. Often I did a bad 
job of balancing time spent coding and time spent dealing with orders.

8. Going to the post office sucks.

9. All too often, you get a weird order. Maybe it's for one of nearly 
every book you sell. Good god, that's a lot of printing. Screw that, 
I'll do it in pieces over the next few days (which turn into weeks, 
etc, as other orders come in). Also, orders seemed to always come in 
clumps. There'd be none for weeks, I'd clear my backlog, then all of a 
sudden six orders come in on one day, and they total up to something 
like 4000 pages of books, 6 CDs, and three dozen floppy disks. Your 
brain explodes.

10. Every mistake or mishandled order makes you feel like crap. It 
might not seem like that when you're all quiet or whatever, but you do 
feel guilty. And that guilt, at least for me, tended to make things 
worse because I'd go into avoidance mode and just ignore all my 
Syndicomm email and whatnot. It was not a good thing at all (and 
clearly I wasn't really cut out for doing retail work because of it!).

These are not meant to be excuses; just a look at some of the things 
that come up. I realized far too late that selling stuff retail was a 
lot more work than it seemed, and I was not good at it. That's why I 
quit doing it! I really hope Tony is able to get and stay caught up, 
but I understand the problems he's having, too.

If there had been someone else I could have turned over Syndicomm's 
keys to, I would have. But after several months of asking around 
quietly, I failed to find anyone else, and I know Tony has a deep love 
of the Apple II and its community, so I chose to give it to him.

I'm sorry people are having problems -- truly -- but I don't regret my 
decision, either.

--
Eric Shepherd
Developer Documentation Lead
Mozilla
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: @sheppy