The Poacher started in the mid-1990s at an IT Consulting Firm called The Hunter Group.
Hard to believe now, but we were having a tough time getting our consultants ON to email. The common tool at the time was voice mail. Walking around the office in the morning, it was common to see several people listening to multiple voice mails while jotting notes on … paper.
This was a time where only the cool people had cell phones (1G). Texting on cell phones then was a novel, expensive capability that almost no one used.
Email required hijacking a phone cord, dialing into the office, and replicating a Lotus Notes email database. The internet existed, but it had little access for regular people and no utility. It also wasn’t connected to everything yet.
Here’s where I stepped in working as Admin and Tech Support for the Hunter Group. The mission was to get everyone using email. The more people use it, the more people use it: the network effect.
My plan was simple: send out a daily comic strip through email. Give our consultants spread over the country a reason to dial into email every day. While getting their “Mother Goose & Grimm”, “Calvin & Hobbes”, or whatever else I found amusing, they would also get all that other “work” email.
I also started blogging about whatever I found amusing that day, way before blogging was invented. Nothing personal, just amusement and idiocy – usually mine. The blogs tended to get larger over time.
This is where the “Disc Space Preservation Society” was born. You see, each one of those emails took up disc space for each of the recipients. Eighty recipients, eighty copies of the email and comic. This was a time when our server disc space was measured in tens of gigabytes. Try less than 100 Gigabytes. On a server.
So, I had to convince our people to read the emails and then delete them from the server so we didn’t crash the business. Yeah, the mission was getting interesting.
So, I commonly would threaten anyone not deleting the emails with “Interrogation” by the Disc Space Conservation Society: Force them to eat pizza and drink beer until they break! You may see this as a recurring theme.
It was all going swimmingly… until the accountants got involved. Accountants and IT really never get along. IT wants to do things and accountants just see money. I have horror stories about accountants and IT. Anyway, I was told to stop.
…As in stop or you’re fired.
But everyone still wanted their daily comic and blurb. And no one really liked those accountants much.
“The Poacher” was born out of going rogue at The Hunter Group. Did I mention that I had admin access to the email server?
The emails continued by The Poacher, but only to those who wanted to be on the list. The list grew through word of mouth. In a short time, most of the company was on the super-secret daily email that wasn’t supposed to be happening. The accountants weren’t on the list.
Then came the COO at the company party. Over a beer, he asked me why I stopped sending out the fun daily email. I pointed to the CFO standing beside him and spilled the beans. I also mentioned that I liked living indoors, eating pizza, and drinking beer.
The COO bought me another beer and announced loudly – intentionally in front of the CFO – that he wanted to see his daily email starting the next day.
The next day the COO and the CFO received their daily Poacher. …And I stayed housed and fed.
The world has changed. The Hunter Group was acquired, sold, and sold again. Everyone got onto email and the idea of spending twenty minutes listening to voice mail finally died its much-deserved death. I no longer send out comics, and servers have hundreds of Terabytes. No need to delete the email off the server. It now seems silly that we every had to.
The Poacher still lives on here on this web site. I’ve archived many of my musings and thoughts here and add to them on occasion. I see something stupid, funny, or even better, a little of both, I’ll jot it down here.
But remember to delete this out of your cache. Or the Disc Space Preservation Society will show up with Pizza and Beer and you will not be happy!
The Poacher
(Randall Groncki)