Fifteen years ago, I worked for a fledgling web design company that, because of its fratboy owner, attracted more than the normal share of creeps, nutjobs, and sociopaths. About three weeks after starting up, the owner referred us to a friend of his who was a VP for one of the biggest ISPs in the Southwest. The VP claimed that his company’s design company was overloaded with work, and wanted us to capture the overflow. Then he wanted us to become an exclusive firm within his company. Then he brought in his crew, and insisted that he was going to buy our company and make them a full subsidiary of ours. In the process, all we needed to do was get his crew places within our shop, and it would be a “done deal.”
Thank god for fratboys. He took so long getting back to the VP that the deal fell through. A week later, one of the VP’s design crew came to us looking for work. It turned out that the VP had planned to jettison his entire web design department, as the only “work” they were getting were from his fratbrothers wanting work for free. He wanted us to take them on board so as to stick us with the costs of severance and unemployment insurance when we’d have no choice but to let them go.
