SvsG:Summary of Events Leading to Dissolution
Staddon vs. Griever: Summary of Events Leading to Dissolution
This page is derived from notes I made during the days after the phone call of 6/24 and my in-person conversation with Lynne and Bubba on 6/22. It was that phone call which convinced me that I had to pull the plug on Bubba's involvement in vbz.net.
Background
vbz.net sells printed t-shirts; people buy them primarily because of how they look, although other factors may play a part. T-shirt manufacturers provide images of the shirts (and other items) they have available each year, so that we don't have to purchase one of each item and photograph it (or scan their printed catalog, which would not provide very good image quality due to various issues).
Obviously an online store such as vbz.net depends a great deal on having these images available (and processed for online consumption) so that customers can see what they're buying.
After we moved all Red House / vbz.net operations from the Danielsville Road location to Bubba's home on Hull Road in 2002, we were having our suppliers ship their image discs to Hull Road. This continued after I moved to Durham because traditionally Bubba had been in charge of processing images. (At a minimum, they have to be resized to fit our web page format -- we use as many as 4 different sizes for each image. Historically, I do the database work: enter the catalog data for the new items and the names of the new image files, tag the image file entries with the appropriate attributes, associate them with their corresponding catalog entries, and rebuild the web pages).
Each year, most suppliers discontinue some of their selection and add new items -- which means new images to process. These are usually available by the end of January at the latest; some manufacturers introduce new items year-round, and sometimes the bulk of the new line is available in time for Christmas. But in any case, we should have had most or all of the 2003 items up not too far into 2003.
And then...
I think it was sometime in April when I started getting seriously frustrated that we didn't have any of the new images processed. The disc for one manufacturer got lost and Bubba ended up asking them for another one... then he misplaced that one, but later found it (I'm sure emails will tell much of the story when I get around to processing that era)... and was too busy to process it. Or something.
I pointed out in May that we were nearly half into the year and didn't have any of the 2003 images up for The Mountain or Zion Rootswear, and only part of one department for Liquid Blue. (These are our three main suppliers, the ones we do the most business with by far.)
Then I pointed it out again in June.
Bubba apparently had the discs by this time, but (still) had a lot of other tasks calling him away. I had long ago volunteered to take on the image processing, or at least some of it; all I needed was a copy of the source images. I even offered to send blank CD-Rs if he couldn't afford to buy any. He agreed to burn me copies and send them, in a sort of unenthusiastic way, when he had time.
I also suggested that future discs should come to me, and I would make copies for him. He didn't seem terribly happy with that idea, but I don't remember any reasons being given.
Then came the Athens trip, and I decided I would go there and burn the copies myself if he wouldn't do it.
When I arrived, Bubba was still being passively uncooperative; I had to go so far as to open his CD-R drive (which I had purchased for "his" computer back in 2001 for the dreaded Xmas CD Project), and insert a blank CD-R from the pack which I had brought along specifically for this purpose in order to get a copy of even one of the image discs I needed.
As soon as started doing this (although I was allowed to get the process going and afterwards retrieve the disc I had made) I was taken aside by Lynne and Bubba in tandem and subjected to one of those extensive conversations of which I can never remember half the details, in which I concede all kinds of things that I didn't realize I was conceding and am later called to task for. (This time, however, I did make notes on the few things I understood I was agreeing to, and emailed them the list... details will be online soon)
Apparently they felt I was straining their trust to the limit by having my own copy of the images (in addition to the merchandise I had taken up to NC to inventory, since Bubba had repeatedly not done any inventorying despite repeated promises) -- the apparent cause being that they were afraid that if I had too much of the store (images, merchandise), I would just "run off" with it. And of course, that's essentially what happened... but they don't seem to see that it's not because they did entrust me with images (and merchandise), but the opposite -- because they were so cagey about letting those things go when it would have been helpful (and "good for the business"... a phrase you will encounter elsewhere) and thereby making it quite difficult to get things done while they continued to be involved.
Having been put through the wringer just to get back one image disc (all I had time for while being grilled), I came to the conclusion (while driving back to NC) that I would have to insist upon any further image discs being sent directly to me.
Before I could email Bubba to let him know this, he emailed someone at Zion Rootswear with whom I had been exchanging emails (cc:ing Bubba so he would know what was going on, as was my standard practice for all vbz correspondence) about the possibility of providing an updated image disc. My discussion with Zion at that point had been leaning toward some kind of FTP transfer rather than a physical disc. Bubba told them that, in the event that they did decide to send out a disc after all, that it should go to [his address on Hull Road].
I responded to Bubba that no, from now on all discs were coming to me, for the obvious reason that we couldn't wait forever for him to process them and that it wouldn't cost him anything for me to be the recipient.
His phone call on the evening of the 24th (around 8pm, just late enough that I'm usually kind of out of it and ready for bed -- his standard procedure for difficult phone calls) was, I believe, in response to that last email.
After all that heavy interaction, I began to notice some patterns in L&B's behavior.
Early Edit History
- 2003-11-02 Page posted on Virtual Battle Zone web site (which was password-protected)
- 2004-01-23 Updated/edited
- 2005-08-03 Posted to wiki (here)