996Outpost.com

Groovzilla wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 7:37 am Hello all,
Long time since I've been around here. Hope everyone is doing well and Happy New Year.

Happy New Year, Groov!

Groovzilla wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 7:37 amLong time since I've been around here. Hope everyone is doing well and Happy New Year.

So this is kind of fun. Closing down our offices at the end of January to go full-remote, and our telco provider is trying to play hardball negotiating new rates...but we do not currently have an agreement in place.

OK, bro. Look at our account...see how many people actually use the phone...and either go with a 3-month term OR continue to be a dick and wait for the port-out notifications to roll in.

I've been doing business-ey things since the 90's, and the telcos have ALWAYS been in a "we're gonna fuck you, no matter what" position. Like the biggest guys with the most smokes in lock-up.

Well, no more. You seen how many people use the phone these days?

Is this the scenario where the Telco is also the ISP and that's why you need them? Otherwise why do you need them? You guys seem like the prime candidate for VoIP.

They started out providing (and we still have some) on-prem equipment, but 99.9% of what we do with them is VOIP, and the other 1% goes away at the end of next week.

"Telco" is a generous description - they're just a provider who bundled the calling package and the circuit from the local ISP.

The only remotely compelling reason to stay with them - other than inertia / touching one less thing right now - is that we own a bunch of decent Polycom phones that are already programmed to work with the existing provider, so shit just keeps working the way it works. Which is awfully attractive when the alternative is dealing with (shudder) people.

All this said, I'm dumping their asses anyway - it's just a matter of when. The lazy fucker on my left shoulder wants to slack for a couple of weeks after the move before dealing with phones (toll-free ring-tos, DIDs for extensions, blah blah blah).

Oh yeah, I think I got banned from RL 997 Forum
Not quite sure yet.

Gnat is still alive and well, in case anyone was wondering. Still going through some things, but ok.

Groovzilla wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 6:53 pm Oh yeah, I think I got banned from RL 997 Forum
Not quite sure yet.

Good to see they are still on top of things over there. I visit the 996TT forum a couple of times a month, maybe post a comment once a month. But , if I ever get banned (again) over there, I doubt I would even realize it before the ban expired.

Schnelly pointed out earlier this year that people just don't use the forums like they did 10 years ago - the activity has moved to social media sites. Judging by the 996TT forum, traffic on Rennlist has to be a small percentage of what it was back in, say, 2015. I see the same threads with few or no new posts at the top of the 996TT forum every time I visit.

5chn3ll wrote: ↑Fri Jan 19, 2024 8:37 am Gnat is still alive and well, in case anyone was wondering. Still going through some things, but ok.

Glad to hear that. Encourage him to stop by here and drop us a quick note.

5chn3ll wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 12:59 pm
I've been doing business-ey things since the 90's, and the telcos have ALWAYS been in a "we're gonna fuck you, no matter what" position. Like the biggest guys with the most smokes in lock-up.

Well, no more. You seen how many people use the phone these days?

This is so true. In the past, when we have switched providers, the outgoing one always tried to pull some kind of cancellation fee trick to force us to stay. "7 years ago when you signed up with us, you signed a 3 year minimum commitment. So, you're going to have to pay a $5,000 cancellation fee now because there was an auto-renew clause buried in the fine print and your anniversary of signing up was last month." Postage meter companies were the same way (we had the same postage meter for 13 years with a one-year initial term that actually tried that after 12 auto-renews). I learned pretty quickly that if you just call their bluff, they back down. My standard response to them became "Rather than threatening us, maybe your appropriate response should be 'Thank you for your business these past many years.' But sure, go ahead and sue me if you think that's the right thing to do."

But the absolute worst was the yellow pages. They were like dealing with the freaking mafia every year at renewal time back in the '90s because they were the only game in town. When they saw the writing on the wall around the year 2000 that the print books were dying, they started doing these deals where they basically gave you the ads in the printed books at super steep discounts (like 90% off) if you signed up for their online advertising services (like SEO/SEM). By 2012, it was apparent that their legacy business practices and overhead made them not only way more expensive than newer, smaller SEO/SEM marketing companies, but that they also sucked at online advertising. When you tried to cancel your online marketing services, they pulled out the old contracts for past print book advertising that said cancellation of the online services meant you had to go back and re-pay all of those print ad discounts they had been giving you in years past. And not just for the current year, but going back 5 or 6 years. One of my competitors (who is also a friend) warned me in advance that they were doing this to his law firm. He refused to pay and they ended up suing him and getting a judgment for over $250,000. Being bankruptcy attorneys, he simply bankrupted his firm and started a new one. Because of that advance warning, I was able to negotiate a buyout, but that still cost me $30,000.