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Just for posterity…

Posted in Crazy Wisdom on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at 10:39 pm by flerly.

I’m still waiting to hear the reaction on The Lanier Situation.

For posterity, here is what I sent in trying to explain the mess and calm tempers, basically taking the fall if necessary. James is right, though. It’s probably not the best time to pick my battles….

To: David Boyd
CC: Marc & Jonathan

Just so you are aware, I wanted to be sure you knew that it was my suggestion to make the speedway directory on our server in Chicago to host the single page for Lanier Speedway indicating their site would be down temporarily and containing their contact information.

You probably already know Dave Liniger, Chairman of RE/MAX, is the owner of that racetrack, and we had been hosting the site as a courtesy to him since RE/MAX makes up a very large portion of our customers. When the sites we host were moved to Chicago, Lanier was left behind without any indication of what we were to do with it.

I know Patrick and Jonathan have been frantically trying to work out an alternate hosting solution for Lanier, so that the transition for them would be as smooth as possible. Even though FNIS has decided it wasn’t necessary to grease these RE/MAX cogs to make sure things run smoothly anymore, just out of a sense of customer service I know many folks in the Atlanta office felt that making sure the transition was smooth for Lanier was probably a smart move.

Well, with the office in Atlanta closing today, we were down to the wire and still without a solution. It was to the point that we were just going to have to unplug the thing and contact Lanier to pick up the machine themselves. I suggest that it might be a good option to place a simple index.html page with their contact information and a notice that the site was being “revised” as our last resort of something positive to throw in when whoever delivers the message that the site is unplugged.

I made the index page, created a directory on one of our servers in Chicago, and left it up to Jonathan to see that the DNS got pointed correctly. In the million other things going on today here, between packing/moving/shutting down/layoffs and 20+ sites to crank out, I just did it and did not wait for any authorization.

Now it seems Brent Marchbanks is very upset over the whole thing, and I think has not agreed to change the DNS entry until he can change it away from FNIS entirely. I’m not sure who we need to speak to in order to make this change, but it seems a very simple request, and a smart bit of customer service on our part to do it.

If it won’t happen, then fine. We can just delete that directory entirely, as it was an entirely new entity and not a copy of their existing site. It was never going to be our intention to try to move hosting of the actual site up to Chicago. We’re really not particularly keen on trying to continue working on this site at all, but it just did not seem appropriate to simply turn it off. Believe me, we’ve worked with the folks from Lanier for a couple years, and they would have no problem making their outrage with the discourteous treatment we’d shown them known to anyone up the ladder that would listen, in FNIS or RE/MAX.

Anyway, just wanted you to know all this so you could pass it on to whomever there needs to know what happened.

Thanks,

Kim M. Thornton
FNIS, Implementation Team

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