Whenever Newsletter 4-1

The website is finally finished, but not without some pain, especially in my wallet. If you've been there, you know that honest techies are rarer than unbroken Butterfingers.

My old techie, whom we'll call Lou Siffer, bid the website and I okayed it. Three weeks later, we were having the same conversation:

"So, uh, when will the site be done?"

"It all depends."

"On what?"

"When I get started."

Finally I asked, "Worst case scenario, when will you finish?"

"Worst case scenario? Never."

And that was that. There's friendly smart-ass, and then there's techie smart-ass.

A week later, Lou sent a bill for $200. I thought he was joking, but there it was, an itemized list of "work" he had done: time spent e-mailing me, time spent on templates we didn't use, time spent learning software...

But here is the punch line: he shut down my site till I paid him!

Now I'm in the humor business, so it's unwise for me to picture people choking on their own vomit. I phoned a friend and found that shutting down someone's site is a felony. That didn't faze Lou, because he's Danish and Danish people don't answer to the laws of lesser races.

The decision lay before me as in Dog Day Afternoon, only this time the robber was the transvestite. I had two options: fly to Denmark and beat him silly or pay the fantasy fees. Because I was only angry enough to get to, say, Idaho, I decided to pay the charges. But I mailed the check with a curse from my wife Yahaira who is Dominican and therefore has cursing authority.

Just be cautious when hiring techies, a strange breed of sunlight-deprived androids whose best creativity is spent on the invoice. Imagine if everyone were techies...

"Yes, sir, the Big Mac was $3.00, but you're forgetting the expense of thinking about cooking the burger..."