techsoldaten

Note to Self: You may not be around to do this yourself, but you built a fine team of really smart people to carry out your plans. Let the winds take the ship where it may, they always blow towards shore.

M

So, I have been on this authenticity kick recently centered around my relationships with people in my business community. Ultimately, we have cooperative relationships between our shops and everyone ‘kinda’ considers themselves friends. I get phone calls, we jabber on about lots of things, we talk for hours about all sorts of wide ranging technical subjects.

But friendship seems to be something else, or at least I am finding that the relationships I have been building are somewhat exploitive and really come down to professional connections. I spend a lot of time on IM telling people who run their own shops how to do work they are supposed to know how to do. Whenever I am busy, they tell me there need it right now and “c’mon – we’re friends”. I have a business partner who only gets involved when the company is about to crash (instead of before, when losses could be cut) and seems to think it makes him a friend. The amount of work I have to put into running the company on my own is tremendous and has an impact on my personal life, no one does that to a friend. I have all these clients who rely on me for advice in matters ranging from installing a wireless network to constructing a strategy for leveraging the Internet for national volunteer recruitment. They don’t always want to pay when I am spelling things out for them, but love to try to get me to work for them for free as a ‘friend of the cause’.

I dunno… it’s kind of flattering to be respected by your peers, but upsetting to see the ways I get used by all these people. Would much rather sit down and have a beer with them sometime, but that would be taking time from their personal lives.

M

Just like the people in San Fran, the people in Berkeley are kinda overrated. I no longer want to hang out there.

M