My friends get to make mistakes

Yes, Six Apart is a company, not a bunch of baby squirrels. It’s a company that screwed up badly, squandering several years of goodwill in a morning. But it’s also a company made up of my friend Ben, who has always been patient with my lack of programming skill, and my friend Mark, who has always been even more patient. It’s a company made up of my friends Shelley and Kristine, who just kept plugging away calmly answering the same questions over and over when I couldn’t face the support forum any more.

My friends get to make mistakes.

I could switch to WordPress, a community led by my friend Matt. Hell, I had a perfectly good import, with a clean and pretty threaded comments hack, back in February, the last time my friends at Six Apart pissed me off. I like open source, I like nightly builds and submitting patches instead of feature requests. I’d love the idea of being able to work my way into the development team, to be able to actually change the core of the app without moving to the Bay Area. But.

My friends get to make mistakes.

I’m not a patsy. Call me for a ride home from the bar and then leave with a stranger you pick up while I’m on the way, and the next time I’ll make you beg, and the third time I’ll make you call a cab. And if my friends at Six Apart ever do anything like letting people work (and it is work) for them beta-testing, thinking they are working on a free-as-in-beer release, only to find that the beer tent they helped set up will be charging $100 a pint with one free shot-glass sample, believe me, you will not even exist to me any longer.

But, my friends get to make mistakes. For now, I’m sticking. Next time they get so far away from the Cluetrain that they can’t even hear the whistle, I might have to count backwards from 1000 in Urdu, rather than 500 in Spanish, before I post, but I’m sticking.

45 Comments

Comment by Jacques Distler #
2004-05-16 22:12:21