August 9th, 2005

So I once had these ideas about how to make money. I don't get these ideas any more, because I realise now that the only way to make money—heaping stinking big-ass bags of money—is to do something that is either illegal or in one of the few remaining grey areas. (Either that or be one of the vanishingly small percentage of the population who was lucky.)

It's a myth that you can have a good idea and make yourself rich with it if you just apply hard work to it. For every success there are scores of people who busted their butt and ate all the crap life could serve up and are still pushing a broom for minimum wage. Either you are lucky or you aren't, and those people who think they are "ambitious" almost always lie on their deathbeds and think to themselves, "Oh fuck I blew it! I coulda had a real life, but instead I chased fame, fortune, and glory and ended up with this pathetic excuse of an existence ... now look at me ... I pissed away my one chance ... [sounds of death rattle gurgling]"

But, before I came to realise this, I still had my dreams of fame and fortune myself. And coming up with some clever every-day thing was how I thought I would do it.

Bad Idea One was for a coin-operated piano. Not a player piano, mind you (that had already been tried a century ago), a regular piano. "Everyone loves playing the piano as much as I do" went my flawed thinking. So I figured you could drop a couple of loonies into the piano, it would open up for 15 minutes, and you could play your favourite pieces. Maybe you'd be with your sweetheart at the mall on a Friday night and want to serenade him/her.

Well ... no.

Very few people play the piano any more; and among the few people who took piano lessons as children there is an even smaller contingent that still plays and isn't embarrassed to be heard playing in public.

Oh, and let's not forget all about vandalism and other incidental damage (someone stealing the strings to make garottes, perhaps).

Strike one.

Bad Idea Two came in the early 1990s when everyone in their 20s (as I was) were bemoaning the fact that they were Gen-X-ers who lost the job lottery, born 10 years too late, etc. By the way, baby boomers: I already had this conversation. So I thought that we Gen-X-ers could have our own line of Gen-X-er bumper stickers:

(That last one sorta gets right to the heart of the bitterness I felt back then, doesn't it?) Well, you get the point. And, in fact, they were not very clever, were they?

Some of the points I hadn't considered, and why these less-than-stunning stickers would not have been the get-rich-quick fodder I thought they would be were: 1) We didn't have cars to put the bumper stickers on, 2) Inciting folks to violence is not exactly legal (but these days you can say things like, "throw rocks at boys" if you want), and 3) Not everyone felt the same bitterness that I did ... or at least directed it towards the same people that I did.

Strike two.

Bad Idea Three was ... well, not that bad actually: I thought there could be something like an off-site third-party automated backup service for your computer software and associated data. Your company's servers would connect to our servers and we'd store the data received for a small monthly fee. Recovery would be a matter of restoring these backups (for not so small a fee) after your company blows up or falls through a crack in the Earth.

I had a lot of the details worked out, including the type of indestructible concrete and steel bunker needed to keep the backups of your data safe, storage media we would use (large optical WORM discs) and style of backup: Full backup followed by incremental backups.

Then a friend with some business administration training and experience worked with me to discover the cost of such a beast. Millions. Yeesh! I had nothing even close to collateral and nothing approaching industry experience to sell in lieu.

And right around that time several people started advertising similar services ... and thus my idea was killed by being about a year too late. Such services have not flourished, either, since people do their own backups and seem content to pretend disasters like nuclear wars and massive company-wide theft (or sabotage) don't occur. As it turns out ... they don't!

And selling people on the fear of such cataclysms had only a short span of time in which to work. And I missed the window.

Strike three.

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