Just Give Up, Jerks

Yesterday, some guy in a business suit walked into the office and stood right inside the door, looking around at our office environment and looking as if he had a meeting with someone. We've been very conscious of who's walking around the office these days, as with four companies occupying the floor, it would otherwise be easy for someone to slip in unnoticed and walk off with a laptop or some other expensive piece of equipment. So I challenged the guy and asked him who he was here to see.

He walked over to my desk and handed me his business card, asking me if I knew who handled office supply purchasing and wanting to know if we had a copier. I asked him if he had an appointment with anyone here. When he said no, I handed him his card back and asked him to leave.

Today, we got a call on our general number from someone who demanded to know the model number and serial number of our copy machine. Since we don't have one, I immediately challenged this guy, too, and asked him who he was trying to reach. He didn't know who he was supposed to be talking to, so he asked for "whoever is in charge of the copier." I told him we didn't have one and asked if his records reflected that his company had any sort of business relationship with us. He said no, so I hung up on him.

Over the course of the last few months, someone will drop by occasionally, claiming to be our rep at Office Supply Company XYZ and wanting to speak with the office manager. Since we don't have one, I always become suspicious and ask them to leave.

Has small business sales always been this sleazy? I'm tired of people pretending to have an existing relationship with our company when they clearly don't. And I'm tired of the solicitors in general. I know people have to make a living, but that doesn't give salespeople the right to walk uninvited into a private place of business and demand to speak to people they don't have appointments with.

Will the Convention Wreak Havoc?

When I see stuff like this, it makes me wonder how my business is going to be affected by the Republican Convention. Underscore is a mere stone's throw from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, and we've talked at the office about what we might do if access to our office is restricted or if traffic and/or public transportation suspensions might make it too much of a pain in the neck to come in to the office.

We've even discussed temporarily moving the office. Thankfully, our network is set up such that anyone can work from pretty much anywhere that they can get a wi-fi connection and a spare phone line. Our IP phones can automatically forward calls to our cell phones or to other land lines. Our central server can be accessed remotely by FTP.

We've heard a number of rumors about suspensions of public transportation during the convention. Considering that I have to take a crosstown bus and the subway in order to get to work, I'm a bit worried about this. But if worse comes to worst, we can always work from home.

Problem is, "home" for me will be my place on Long Island starting on September 1. And where do the Long Island Rail Road trains come into the city? Via Penn Station.

I'm thinking this might be a good week to take a few days out of the office and work from Long Island.

Tired Of This Crap

Nice to wake up this morning to find that some butt plug sent me nearly 650 pieces of comment spam last night. Over 300 of them were for some deviant rape fantasy site. Anybody know of anything you can add to MT-Blacklist that confirms comments with one of those anti-submission-script scripts? I'm starting to tire of this daily ritual.

Falluja: Insurgent Safe Haven

Everybody check out this article in the Times.

CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq, July 6 - American and Iraqi officials say that a decision in April to pull back American forces from Falluja inadvertently created a safe haven for terrorists and insurgents there. But officials are reluctant to send American troops back into the city for fear of touching off another uprising.
The officials say they are unsure how to proceed, but agree they merely postponed the problem when the Americans halted an attack in April, brokering a deal to keep Americans out of Falluja and allow local Iraqis to police the city instead.
Iraqi and American officials say they would prefer to re-enter the city with a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers, perhaps backed up by Americans. But they concede that an Iraqi force capable of mounting an effective assault on Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is months or even years away.

"Postponed the problem?" So, in other words, we handed over Iragi sovereignty to meet an arbitrary deadline while a major objective in the War on Terror still lies ahead of us - one the Iraqis cannot handle on their own and one the U.S. isn't looking forward to addressing because it doubts it can handle it without a major uprising?

I think it's safe to say that a government isn't truly sovereign if it can't secure its own territory. George W. Bush has made it clear that our enemies are countries that foster terrorism or provide safe haven for them. What's Fallujah, then? Iraqi sovereignty doesn't do the U.S. a lick of good if there's an entire city of 250,000 people where lawlessness reigns and where terrorists can operate safely.

So we went in, snagged the "bad guy" (Saddam Hussein's regime) whose connection to 9/11 terrorists is questionable, turned over sovereignty and left behind what G.W. has been saying all along is the real enemy - terrorists.

If G.W. wants to have any credibility at all vis-a-vis the War on Terror, he had better align his actions with his words.