What happens when you piss people off

While tweaking my site, looking through Google's stats for keywords hitting my resume, I noticed a couple of people searching for "Acumen Envision". It sent me down memory lane a bit.

Back in 2001, when I was working for the train wreck that was Digital Science, one of the gigs I got was a one-day training course delivered to a bunch of the techs at Independent Newspapers. The brief was incredibly vague: they wanted an introduction to Linux, using a book as the guide. So I picked up the book and, with only a day's notice, built a rough outline of a walkthrough and got ready to deliver it. With such short notice, I arrived damn early at the site to make sure everything was going to be there. I asked about installing Linux, one of the few things mentioned in brief, on all the machines in the training room and was told no problem.

Needless to say, it was a very challenging day but I think I did pretty well. I took the group through installing and configuring Linux, explaining all the things I thought would be important to the audience of developers and sysadmins, comparing and contrasting with Solaris which they knew well. At the end of the day, the client was very happy with me and less happy with the training company, Acumen Envision. He could tell (and I also told him) that they were a bit of a shoestring, fly-by-night company.

At the end of the day, my employer Digital Science never managed to get paid for the work I did. They claimed it had cost them thousands of pounds to re-image the training machines, which I'd been explicitely told I could install over. Fortunately it wasn't my (direct) problem, and it was only a couple of days' work so not worth going after too hard.

So I thought I'd Google the company name and see what came up. Wow. Looks like these guys did the same non-payment trick to other people. They, and the head honch Rennie Garcia, really pissed this guy off. So much so, he had the company wound up and even set up another site with material from other people who'd been ripped off, this time in Spain. It even looks like he's been arrested. Hurrah!

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