“Hello, Sir”

How one thoughtless word can destroy a potential vendor relationship or cost you a job or hundreds of thousands of dollars

Shoes on asphalt straddling a line — symbol for male is on the left, symbol for female is on the right

I have been in tech a really, really, really long time. I’ve reached the tipping point where frequently I’ve been in tech longer than some of my co-workers have been alive.

I just celebrated the 41st anniversary of the “first time getting paid for writing code by someone I wasn’t related to.” The code was in Basic, and it was a compound interest calculator written on a PET Commodore 2001. Yes, I actually remember when 2001 was considered “the future” instead of history. The “sending my first email” milestone will be a couple of months after the coding milestone. It was on ARPAnet sent on a VT100 dumb terminal— and for the record, it was a question about calculus homework.

Fast-forward four decades. I now occasionally post small jobs on Freelancer, Fiverr, or Upworks. Usually these jobs are seeking help for administrative work I despise, like data entry or checking research references. Most recently it was to set up a functional installation of an accessible open source learning management system called Sakai, used by the University of Hawaii for over 100,000 students. Bottom line is I have WAY more projects that interest me than available time (or energy). When there…