An anonymous author wrote a post title We’re Shutting Down and I’m Scared over at startupsanonymous.com:

After over two years, backing from a well-known accelerator, nearly one million in funding and a decent amount of traction, we’re shutting down.

I’m scared. I’m also sad, disappointed, ashamed, embarrassed & deflated. But mostly just scared.

This struck a nerve. I remember going to Ohio for a trip in 2007. It was September and I remember taking a walk with my dad and just feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. I admitted that after 10 years it was likely the end for Infinity Softworks. Sales had plummeted 80% in the past two year, our new product had bombed, and I had laid off most of our team. I was exhausted and devastated. I had failed everyone: my family, my investors, my team, my customers.

I also had no clue what I was going to do. My programming skills were on platforms that no one cared about and my management skills were all based around starting a business, a group that has no money. I was worried about how I would pay for my family to eat, let alone keep a roof over our heads.

Somehow things resolved themselves. One employee stayed and the iPhone opened to developers and one of my investors was interested enough to lend us some money. We rebuilt.

In some ways our situation is better today, and in some ways it isn’t that different. The difference now, though, is that the skills are transferable and in demand, Infinity Softworks has revenue that isn’t going away, our expenses are about as low as a company can go, and we have designs on an amazing new service that we think we can build a company around again. Even if this falls apart, there is a little money, skills and experiences that will be in high demand. I know I will land on my feet.

I also know that if it wasn’t for those dark days in 2007, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

On Saturday my favorite black ink pen ran dry. [1] It seems like such a trivial thing but this single pen has lasted me 16 years. It was a throw-away pen from a Palm developer conference exhibitor from 1998. The irony: the company didn’t make it out of the .com era but that pen did!

I never gave much thought to why this pen was so special until it died. [2] Then suddenly I’m scrambling to find a new one. I tried all the pens in the house but none were as good. I found four problems, generally:

1. They had a cap and caps are too easy to lose. I use my black pen a lot when highlighting physical books. Since I’m selective in my highlighting, it spends large amounts of time in my hand. So I don’t risk writing on myself and because I want to preserve the pen’s useful life, I always keep the pen covered. With a cap, I’d have to use two hands to cap/uncap. A click pen works much better.
2. They needed to be warmed up. A couple of the pens we had around here seemed to constantly dry. I’d draw a line to highlight a passage, read for a while, draw another. By the time I’d draw the second the stinking ink wouldn’t come out and I’d have to try two or three times to get a line. This happened even if I retracted the tip. How annoying!
3. They weren’t the right weight. I like a medium tip pen. Thin pens don’t do it for me at all. On top of that, some pens didn’t feel right in my hand. Some were too heavy in the tip and some too heavy in the back.
4. It didn’t move on all kinds of paper well. I found that many of the pens would work fine on a smooth paper but on a little rougher one, the pen wouldn’t move across the paper well, wouldn’t leave the right amount of ink, or would move with the paper instead of my hand, making my lines jag all over the place.

Silly, right? A little so. Plus, it really shows off my anal retentive nature, something I would have been embarrassed about and hid when I was a teenager but now embrace. [3]

The bottom line, though, I made a rare pilgrimage to my local Office Depot and bought myself a new pen. [4] Hopefully my hunt will be over and I won’t have to go through this hell for another 16 years.

—

[1] Yes, I keep one black ink pen and one blue ink pen on my desk. My blue ink pen, a Cross pen given to me by my high school computer science teacher as a graduation gift, is my absolute favorite pen, mostly for the memories. I use it primarily for contract signing, which I learned long ago to do with a blue pen so I can tell when it had been copied.

[2] May it rest in peace, wherever the souls of great pens go after death.

[3] Thank you, Apple, for making anal retentive-ness okay. And thank you, web, for making “nerd” a positive term.

[4] It’s a Foray 1.2mm advanced ink ballpoint, four to a package, for $3. And yes, I opened the package to try it out first.

Every once in a while there is something that happens and I just have to wait for that situation to resolve itself. The past month has had one of those situations. Ten other decisions [1] hung in the balance while I waited on this one event to resolve itself. There was nothing I could do to speed up the process. I just had to wait.

I could do other things while I waited. I could try to line up everything so coming out of the decision I could move quickly. I did that. I worked on re-arranging the financials about three dozen times and worked on streamlining some of the existing costs. I could analyze what happens in each situation, depending on the decision, but I couldn’t execute and I couldn’t do anything else. I could only wait.

Last Thursday, finally, the decision resolved itself. It didn’t come out the way I preferred but I’ve been running a business long enough to know that sometimes the decisions that work against me at the time they are decided end up being the right decisions in the end.

At first I was sad. I wasn’t wanted and that is depressing. But as the evening wore on I figured it is the way it is meant to be, that it really doesn’t change our near-term plans anyway, and all the things that have been stuck can finally flow. It’s like having a big bolder finally moved out of the way of my stream, and now the water is flowing again.

I have another week to plan and organize and then back to coding, hopefully this time with a release soon around the corner. I knew that this decision would open up avenues one way or the other. What I didn’t realize was that there would be a sense of relief with any decision at all. I’m excited to move on.

—

[1] Exaggeration

We are traveling to Florida the end of March. We booked the travel in November because it is Spring Break and traveling during the Break is always risky. At the same time we booked a car. This past week my grandmother called to offer us her car. No reason to spend the money on a rental, she said. We were grateful.

I called this morning to cancel the car and was told I rented the car under a no change, no refund policy. I couldn’t believe it. I’m calling more than three weeks before the travel and Hotwire is telling me I have no recourse. They said this was part of the agreement, which of course is only provided as a click through link when signing up, and then is buried in a multi-page agreement. I don’t remember the site ever once saying, clearly, booking this car means no changes and no refunds.

So I called Hertz. Here’s a company that supposedly takes care of their customers. No dice there either. They basically said I should have booked with us instead. Great. I have a $400 rental car in Florida that I don’t need. I love pissing money down the toilet.

It bothers me that Hotwire trusts their services so much that they bury important information like no refunds or changes. (Delta changed our flight and we arrive 7 hours earlier. Hotwire wouldn’t change our arrival time either — no changes — so who knows if we will have a car when we get there.) This makes Hotwire look shifty and underhanded.

I’m just as disappointed in Hertz, though. Here’s a company that supposedly takes care of their customers and they are basically telling me to pound sand. Why, if you want a good relationship with your customers, would you even rent cars through assholes like Hotwire? Could you imagine buying an iPhone at an AT&T Store and then Apple telling you they won’t support your iPhone because you didn’t buy it from them?

It’s not like I’m an amateur here. I’ve sold products to customers for 17 years. We have always tried to accommodate them even when they didn’t buy through us. This is particularly challenging in the App Store world, where we are given no recourse for our customers. I’ve given away tons of promo codes to customers who felt they bought the wrong product even though we have no means to prove a purchase was made.

I will definitely never book anything through Hotwire again. And as for you, Hertz, we’ll see if I get over this one. At the moment I wish a plague on both your houses.

As I mentioned last Friday, I have a bunch of links saved up. Last week’s links were business-oriented. This week’s are for fun instead of profit:

• Degenerate, Inc.: The Paranoid and Obsessive Life of a Mid-Level Bookie by Doug Brown. A fascinating look inside the life of a sports bookie. (via Om Malik)
• I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave by Mac McClelland. Makes me think twice every time I buy anything online. I can’t help wondering if this is the future (present?) for those without college degrees? (via Om Malik)
• The Art of Presence by David Brooks. A few thoughts, beautifully written, about how to help when tragedy strikes.
• A Speck in the Sea by Paul Tough. The story of John Aldridge, who survived hours in the North Atlantic Ocean after falling overboard his fishing boat. (via Matt Hughes)
• The Steroid Hunt by Bryan Curtis. We know what owners, managers and players did during baseball’s steroid era, but what about writers? (via Matt Hughes)
• The Perfect Storm for Snow Rollers by Kim Hone-McMahan. For all of you snowed in the past two weeks, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard. Never seen it, though.
• The New York Filming Locations of The Godfather, Then and Now by “Scout”. Just as the title says. (via Daring Fireball)
• Parenthetical Song Titles by Joe Posnanski. Posnanski explores the sketchy and legitimate uses of parentheticals in song titles — (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction — with hilarious results.