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Filthy lucre

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 16:06

Steve Cassidy sticks up for the moneymakers - sort of - and has a run-in with a few Broadband router products.

It's too easy to sneer at moneymakers - Steve Coogan's little-seen but intensely memorable salesman character, Gareth Cheeseman, could have been created by nerds deep in the basement of the company he represents. I tend to sit quietly through the emotional outbursts when techies get on to the topic of the money people, doing my best not to yell at anyone as they lay out what amounts to a political manifesto, to the effect that since they can't participate in the business of making money it must therefore be a bad thing to do. Those who ask for money are up to no good - dishonest, uncaring, rapacious and untrustworthy - all attributes that conveniently excuse your classic techie from either respecting the bread-heads or believing anything they have to say. A good techie saves his or her money, which means not just attempting to get an occasional few per cent off a laptop purchase, but rather spending nothing. Ever.

Now this kind of belief system amounts to a hidden religion or, if you prefer, a political party without any seats in Parliament (feel free to write in and propose candidates for such a post). It's one of those deeply held convictions that can't even be broached, much less overturned, without proffering some clear and direct evidence of a benefit (right in front of the boss) that might accrue from thinking about the moneymakers and how they operate. This month, I extracted a grain of pleasure from an otherwise ghastly situation, precisely because it threw up a good chance to challenge some of these ingrained assumptions about the nature of money and moneymakers, in the minds of the techies... (Actually, there are two separate points to be made here, and if I'm going to follow my own advice I ought to cut quickly to the chase with the first and then reveal a bit more detail via the second.)

First comes the advice that I'm both giving and taking, which is to not get tangled up in the emotions of a situation. By all means feel the strain, but keep your distance from it. Ostentatious wallowing in crisis is all very well if you're a disadvantaged youth on a reality TV show (or Paris Hilton), but the rest of us need to be a bit more adult about such things. For example, when a whole company loses its only connection to the internet it's all too easy to get dragged along by the emotions of its users, those annoying moneymakers who seem to spend so much of their time playing with other people's emotions to part them from their money. It's tempting to indulge yourself in the wide-eyed panicking, the high-tension finger-pointing and the deep, dark desire to single out the uninvolved and punish them too. Because, let's be honest here, it's an unusual business that can survive being cut off from the net for very long nowadays.

On the one hand there are all those dull, businessy things the net delivers such as VPNs and email and access to e-commerce sites, but on the other there's the vapid, amusement-oriented and personal stuff, from Hotmail through Ebay to the lurking oddities of online porn. Lose your net connection and chances are that a culture-clash of epic proportions will start up and escalate rapidly just outside the door to the IT room, with the moneymakers, lead-swingers, legal and banking types (and most likely your boss too) all wanting a piece of the action. What I strongly suggest you don't do - while things are still in meltdown and you're on hold to tech support - is to suddenly announce: "Hey, everyone who's bugging me, what's this connection worth to you?" They would either think that you're crazy for not knowing that already (they would, of course), or else you may receive answers that will make your hair stand on end. The last time I tried this trick during a service outage, a wily old accountant immediately chipped in that every day lost on his system cost his firm £150,000 in late billing. Now such a figure is both defensible and arguable at the same time - those missed bills would in fact just get sent the next day, and the cost of doing that isn't anything like £150,000 in lost interest or staff overtime. But the technical team on the ground had always felt as if it was just working on a £5,000 server and valuing the use of the resource wasn't its department.