SMB BS Epiphany

Yup, straight out of the IBM commercial. I was speaking with Bob Belon and Beatrice Mulzer around 1 AM last night (all three of us were working at the time on a Saturday night) and my Jimminy Cricket came on to give me a long deserved three-way bitchslap about trying to preach to ignorant people why they should be more professional as engineers and businessmen. Point taken, I'm done. As much as I believe that deep down inside everyone strives to be better and have a long-term philosophy for both their business and their customers that is simply not the case. I've been seriously depressed by the outright ignorance of many SMB IT consultants but until yesterday I just figured they were just never pointed in the right direction. Here are the idiotic quotes that piss me off to no end:

"I don't have time to read books, I'm too busy with real work!" "I'm on my way to the client, can you brief me on the basics?" "I've been in this business for a long time, nobody ever threatens me." "My customers will not buy that, they value me too much." "My customers are my friends, they even have a table set for me." "I am a high level strategic advisor, not a support monkey." "Dell/Microsoft/Google are not a threat, their support blows." "I don't want to call PSS, I'm probably just missing something easy so I'll spend next 12 hours to fix it myself." "I never want to be more than a single proprietor" "My customers do not see me as a vendor, I'm a trusted advisor"

Mind you these are the same folks that light a torch on fire the moment their freebies get even remotely stepped on by Microsoft. They are the first ones to storm the gates, migrate to Linux, recommend OpenOffice.org and vote with their feet. Meanwhile I'm the guy training these folks, I'm sponsoring community projects out of my own pocket and I'm pissing off my friends at Microsoft by representing the problems of this bunch? Chris is right, I am insane. No more. From this day forward I am done with the lowest common denominator of IT unemployment. I have my own monkeys to wrangle and train and I'd rather speak to real IT professionals and serious business owners than the supposed IT strategists that can't see the future past the stuff that is slamming them in the face.