Dot-com Liquidator

Stephen VanDyke writes: "The Lexington Herald-Leader has an interesting article on the day of a "repo man". Marty Pichinson doesn't repossess cars or homes, he goes after companies that flopped." Second in a series.

Comments

Has he paid VA Linux a visit yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

If not, he will be soon...

I had to do this last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Our main offices were closing, and we had to pick up ALL the equipment from these people. It was sad, the only people left were a few admins trying to close up shop, and a few bean counters trying to inventory everything. It was easy to see why this office closed. I mean who the hell needs a 10 ft mahonany, and bronze plaque with your logo on it, in the loby when you're an internet company!? The equipment we got from them was top of the line. Their were many racks of stuff that was never even opened, and their were 21 inch monitors everywhere. Considering that most programers at our office use 17 inch monitors and p450 systems, we could see why this division had run out of cash so fast. It's funny, we always thought we were the red headed step child in the company, but it turned out that our division was the only one making money. I had no problems getting the equipment from those over paid, and over perked people.

Repo men are impressive

[harlows_monkeys]

Many years ago (long before the dot.com stuff), I worked at a small Unix workstation company (Callan Data Systems...anyone remember them?). We got behind in the payments on this big machine that did something with blueprints (I'm a programmer...I have no idea what this thing did...but it was big...about 6ft wide and 4ft long, and 3ft tall, and it weighed a lot).

The blueprint machine was in a room in the center of the engineering building. There were two entrances to the building. To go from the front entrance to the blueprint machine room, you would have to go past the office of one of the company owners, and the secretary, and a couple of engineer's offices.

To get to the blueprint machine room from the back door, you would have to go past my office, and the offices of four other programmers.

All the desks in all the aforementioned offices faced their doors, so anyone working could easily see anyone who went down the hall.

One day, the machine was repossesed. It happened between 11am (when someone last used it), and 1pm (when someone tried to use it, and found it was gone). During that time, none of the people in any of the offices I mentioned above went to lunch.

No one saw anything. Evidently, at least two people managed to walk in, go past several people, and carry the machine out, all without being seen.

Oh, the irony...

[legLess]

From the article:

In the last six months, his firm, Sherwood Partners, has picked up 45 ABC assignments, up from none a year ago. He has enlarged his staff to 20 people from six, and will hire five more. "This business has just exploded," he says.

So soon we'll need Meta-Repo-Man, to liquidate all the Repo Men who sprang up to cash in on the .com crash.

"We all say so, so it must be true!"

Reminds me of "Rain on the Scarecrow"

[President of The US]

By John Mellencamp:

The crops we grew last summer weren't enough to pay the loans
Couldn't buy the seed to plant this spring and the Farmers Bank foreclosed
Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land
He said John it's just my job and I hope you understand
Hey calling it your job ol' hoss sure don't make it right
But if you want me to I'll say a prayer for your soul tonight

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