Laughing

[mbarrick]

On a whim I just checked up on the freaking ridiculous dot com start-up that was the bane of my existence just over two years ago. I was subcontracting through The (mis)Communications Group for OneGoodCar.com. With TCG lacking the balls about actually taking on the consulting role they kept making lip service to and instead bending and twisting to every whim coming out of OneGoodCar.com's visionless and underinformed committee of used car salesmen and general morons I went through a purely hellish ordeal of re-writing an e-commerce application repeatedly on a completely unrealistic timetable. By working endless 16-20 hour days with no days off, doing things like fielding 5am panic phonecalls from the technically incompetent management of OneGoodCar.com to my home number that TCG deigned to give out, I managed to deliver everything they asked for... then they didn't like it. The bailed on the whole thing and contracted some other company to build exactly the functionality I recommended to them way before the first line of code was ever written and decided not to pay TCG. So TCG decided not to pay me. At then end of several hundred hours work where I successfully integrated every ad hoc change thrown at me I had squat to show for it. So a pissing contest ensued where I demanded TCG cough up for the work they contracted me to do since I in fact did it without flaw or fail. They paid, but needless to say they weren't happy about it.

Anyway, OneGoodCar.com just came to mind because I was recycling some of the code from that project into something I'm working on now and I thought I'd tale a look and see if they were still out there. They aren't. A quick little jaunt into NSI's whois database and lo and behold, they didn't even make it through last year:

Record expires on 15-Jun-2001.
Record created on 15-Jun-1999.

The site was launched October 1999 with my code (bastardized by 437 unplanned, unconsidered spec changes), which (no surprise) was deemed too complicated and too cumbersome by subsequent focus groups (organized by TCG's own market researchers!), then re-launched in December 1999 with someone else's implementation of my original recommendation. A year and a half later they didn't bother renewing the domain.

And TCG? Well, despite what their website that hasn't been updated in two years says, they don't do e-commerce anymore.