This is just a silly little thing for those who might find it funny....
Here's a blast from the dot com past. Back in 2000, in the go-go days of dot coms (before I got into the go-go days of real estate), I worked for a dot com called Good2CU.com. I liked the project, a credit union portal. We had substantial funding by a company called Billing Concepts which was run by Parris H. Holmes Jr. (Butch as he was known). I didn't know Butch, so I have nothing to say about him, good or bad, but as I rummaged through my desk, I found this piece of paper:
The concept was that he wouldn't give us benefits in REAL dollars. Instead, he was minting his own money. The money could be used at a modern "company store" where you could buy company promotional items like coffee mugs and stuff. I'm not sure they even sold bags of chips at the company store (which, by the way, was 60 miles away in a different city).
You have got to wonder what kind of head trip was going on with the idea of minting your own money with phrases like "The Buck Starts Here" and "E. Pluribus Butchum". But then again, there was another dot com company, Agillion, that reportedly spent some crazy amount of money like $60M to generate sales of less than $1M and their CEO reportedly had flown everyone down to Cabo San Lucas for a big company party which they filmed while their CEO rode a horse on a beach while all the workers flocked around him. So I guess if that's the right comparison, then the CEO paying his workers in Company money with his own picture on it just doesn't seem so crazy. I guess that's what I loved about the dot-com days - the craziness was all relative, and as things got crazier, they got WAY crazier.
As I bought office furniture and printers from the Garden.com auction when shut that dot com down, I overheard one of the twenty-something workers say, "Gee, every other job from here will just be inferior." Well...YEAH. Ping-pong instead of work before company-funded catered lunches isn't exactly the way American companies stay alive!
In some kind of weird, Hunter S. Thompson kind of way, this all made sense to us back in those days. (What did HST say....When things get weird, the weird go professional?) SO WHY DO I HAVE THESE BUTCH BUCKS? Well, I only received about 5 or 6 of them, and before I could spend $20 in gas to get to the company store to spend them, Butch shut down our whole company putting us all out on the street looking for work. I even had to file a formal complaint with the local labor board to get some compensation (real money) that had been promised to me. Of course, I won the complaint and I got my money, and we moved away to start a real estate business, and we avoided getting burned too badly on the sale of our house, so all's well that end's well.
Anyway, I look back on those days with both both grins and chagrin. :)
John Hokkanen
Comments(0)