Work has been quieter then usual (as I expected) recently, so I took it upon myself to do a little side project. It’s a simple enough idea, a small web app to run “on the cloud” (as it were) that let’s customers schedule appointments and bookings with our frontline technicians. This means the guy at the desk isn’t starting his day without known, or at least having a good idea, of what to do. It also means he might have a good idea of what the customer’s problems were.

Furthermore, from a cost perspective, it means we can use the website to charge customers for longer consultations, one-to-one’s etc. up front instead of having that awkward moment when a diagnostic turns into an hour long “how to use computers properly” session, free of charge.

So I got the rudimentary idea together and it works fine. It’s fast, the database is logging everything we need and I wrote a small script to spit the database information out for people to organise scheduling. All I need to add is a ticketing system to give everything an I.D. that’s traceable, which later on might allow I.D.’s to be assigned to specific staff (depending on the roster, etc.).

All well and good, and took less than an hour to get the basics of it running. I sent on the proof-of-concept to people who might be interested in it. The response? We have a guy in India who can do it.

This happened when I developed the web store. Because no one built redundancy for when I pour my heart and soul into a project that the department I run will suffer. I can’t do 40 hours in one dept. and 40 hours on a side project that will definitely make lots of cash. But I got it done and ready to launch. We launched, and then the little niggly bits to change after was handed over to someone in India (a former employee) who has more time to focus on small changes – mainly cosmetic. Fine, but I got no recognition for the work I did. Which was most of it…

As such, given this code was 100% my own work and my contract is not as a developer, but as a manager, so has no clause about “work done inside the building is ours” I’ve decided to let it die, refuse to hand over my code and either let them start from scratch (and I know the guy in India hasn’t got it in him – he’s not bad, but he’s certainly not good enough to see it from start to end) or let the idea die.

It’s another notch in a long list of things that are irritating me to no end.