September 06, 2004

There can be no better way to observe Labor Day than to share this story from Senior Cubeland Correspondent Tim Dempsey:

I have this pretty talented friend. He worked in support for Authorize.Net. They provide a service that allows Web sites to accept credit cards and have tons of important customers. My friend got laid off in the first round of layoffs years ago. Though he held a grudge, he accepted a job with them again several months later. He had, in the meantime, been studying programming.
      Authorize.Net has lots of problems. One is that when customers try to upload batches of transactions, they sometimes get stuck or time-out. My friend created a tool which modified the batch files and gave them a much better chance of being processed the first time and in a timely fashion. He asked the company if he could get some space on the corporate servers to host this web-based tool. The company told him that since he was merely a support person, not a true developer, they could not endorse the tool.
      So he put the tool on his home server. But the thing is, since the tool actually worked really well, it became known to customer service and was soon being handed out like candy to every whiny A-Net customer who called in. The tool reduced their pain, so the users became addicted. By now, even my friend's managers were asking that the tool be moved to the corporate server, but the request fell on deaf ears.
      Then it's suddenly layoff time again, and my friend again gets the axe. The tool, however, remained accessible from his home server. Two years go by and it becomes an institution--users have come to rely on it on a daily basis. But when yet another round of layoffs hit the ranks the other day, my friend decided to commemorate the event with a little update to the tool.
      What Authorize.Net users currently see, ladies and gentlemen, is this.