Since I’ve just recently gotten in touch with a whole bunch of friends from back home again, I thought I’d post a quick recap of what’s been happening, entitled “How It All Went Wrong”. :/ Those of you who read my other blog have heard it all.
The project that I created was basically a social networking and incentives site originally meant to act as a communications platform between kids, schools and parents. Due to the connection with the schools, it was going to be the first site that could actually age-verify kids and keep them from personal (non-public) contact with adults. You can’t let parents verify kids, since they may not be parents OR children. You don’t have access to handy personal data like Social Security or National Insurance numbers – the schools were the only way that I could think of to verify kids. We also did a lot of really spiffy things like 3D personal rooms and avatars, all fully customisable, blogs, galleries, video upload, forums, build your own communities, etc. It was a good project, and should have been one of those career-making projects.
And it failed…after two years, we just basically ran out of investment money. The Scouts were supposed to bring all their members on the platform, and that deal fell apart. We hired a business manager at £70k per year who did nothing, and totally didn’t understand the site, wanted to downplay all the potentially messy social-networking stuff. Hell0? I mean, wtf? At every turn, every good opportunity for us went bad.
The worst part was two Christmases ago, when just days before the holiday break, I had to stand in front of my team and tell them that payroll was going to be short. I could feel my knees shaking as I talked to everyone, and I didn’t know if I was going to cry or throw up.
At the end, as hard as we tried to survive, the project finally ended. Phil and I had both been working for the company, he in Marketing and me as Web Director over the project and various teams, so when the offices closed we were owed £18.5k, somewhere around $27k. Devastating.
Since then, we’ve basically been waiting for the holidays to be over, and now we’re looking for work, but times are very hard. I get called about tons of jobs, all of them on the other side of the country. At this point, we’re looking at losing the house, and there’s no money to rent a flat in London or wherever so that I can work. We can’t sell the house since we remortgaged just before everything fell apart – thank god we did, as that is the only thing that saved us.
And that is the sad story of the last year of my life. That’s kind of why I stopped personal blogging, because everything was so veryvery grim. As my momma used to say, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. :D
But no bad luck lasts forever, and I have hope that things will turn out ok in the end. I have to believe that.