Well-Meaning Guys Under Siege

Chowhound was racking up $300/month in data transference surcharges, and I didn't have it. Our massive popularity was straining the rented server, and we were forced to pay for it.

I needed to devise some profit streams, and fast, so I supervised design and execution of a line of t-shirts and tchotchkes such as the Chowhound Passport—sliding cards reading "Give me the real stuff, not the tourist stuff" in eight languages to show one's waiter. Plus a bundle of newsletters which I'd edit and distribute in my spare time.

A thousand passports arrived, to my surprise, unassembled. They needed to be laboriously folded and glued. I threw a party for some friends to help assemble them. In an ideal world, I'd have plied them with great food and drink, but all I could swing was beer and chips. Anyway, we assembled just 100. Not nearly enough.

One attendee sighed and volunteered to tackle the rest as a Zen exercise in gracious patience. A week later, she handed me back 900 passports, ready to go. And of course I thanked her, but not, like, a LOT. And I didn't subsequently include her in my life—because even my best friends weren't included in my life, which was absorbed with seven full time unpaid jobs while trying to somehow make rent. It was cleary unviable, but I didn't want to disappoint a million nice people by shutting down that monstrous albatross of a website.

I sold the site a few years later, and, a year after that, the corporate machinery spat me out like a lead slug, and then there was recuperation and various ingenious and heartfelt ventures which all drew vacant stares. Decades were passing. I'd tried reconnecting with old friends, but they'd all moved on. A few were jealous, most just indifferent. And I never reapproached this person. So much time had gone by.

Relatable, right? If so, it's only because I've convincingly shared the framing of a well-meaning guy under siege. But imagine the perspective of that other person.

I've written all this to share one nugget of insight you might want to bear in mind: Well-meaning guys under siege can look like assholes.


"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."