Chapter 20: Give Me The Assets or You’re Fucking Dead and The Hackers Attack

July 6, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

Give Me The Assets or You’re Fucking Dead

The assets of the business were both tangible and intangible. The tangible assets included computer, camera, sound and lighting equipment (pretty much anything needed to broadcast live grinds). The intangible assets consisted mostly of login details and passwords for various social media and email accounts. I was not going to part with either.

When the dwarves fucked our final barrel of cash into the bonfire, we were no longer able to pay our office and studio rent, so we (I) had to move out. Thank you again to my friend Barry (who had nothing to do with OnlineGrinds.ie) for helping me move the stuff.

In the absence of somewhere more suitable to keep all the equipment, I kept it in my home in Ballsbridge. This was a very privileged location for the equipment, as there was a Doberman guarding it 24/7.

The Doberman I commissioned to guard the OnlineGrinds.ie assets. Here he is protecting the perspex sign that once hung on the office wall.

Sean was under pressure to get the assets to BS before he returned back to the UK. He had come over especially for the EGM, and was leaving a day or two later. After several attempts to ring me to arrange a pick up point and time (which I regretfully wasn’t able to answer as I was too busy perming my hair), he ended up calling out to my home one evening unannounced. When he didn’t find me there (I think I was at my flower arranging class), he left a note under my door saying that he would call back later.

In many ways I felt sorry for Sean. He had to do all the dirty work. BS would never have called around to me to get the assets. He wouldn’t have been able to face me. He is probably right though. I don’t think I would have been able to resist the urge to wrap a concrete block around his Florida white smile, if he ever did.

As it happened, I was moving out of my place in Wellington Place at the time in search of greener pastures with larger running space for my pooch. The assets, both tangible and intangible, came with me.

As I was leaving work one day, I received a phone call from a mobile number. Unlike blocked numbers, I tend to answer unknown numbers, particularly mobile numbers. I have a very strict policy with blocked numbers; if you don’t want to identify yourself, I don’t want to answer. Anyway, on the other end was a gentleman by the name of Larry O’Driscoll (LOD). A transcript of the conversation can be found below. If would prefer to hear me act it out, click below:

Paul: Hello

LOD: Hello is that Paul Stenson

Paul: It sure is! Who is this?

LOD: My name is Larry O’Driscoll. I believe you have some assets belonging to Moreland Investments Ltd.?

Paul: What company are you calling from? You are ringing me from a mobile phone, you know that?

LOD: As I said my name is Larry O’Driscoll. I collect business assets on behalf of my clients.

Paul: Well I am sorry but the assets I have belong to my company, not Moreland Investments. I am still dealing with Sean K*****y in relation to this.

LOD: What is the nature of your dealings with Sean K*****y?

Paul: Take care mate.

Asking me what was the nature of my dealings with Sean? Is he for real? I would have actually kept speaking to this man, but getting personal like that? Fuck that for a game of soldiers.

Needless to say I wrote Sean an email warning him about this dude. See below:

Email I sent Sean warning him about dodgy Larry

As I had moved out of my house, I guess I had escaped from LOD. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that he probably called around to my ex-home to try to physically strip me of the assets, using extreme force. I’d say he would have been armed with either a crowbar or a baseball bat. Something blunt. A sharp object wouldn’t have been his style. That would have been far too easy. LOD needed a challenge when he was faced with the task of beating the shit out of me.

LOD seemed like the roughest of the rough. I’d say he was associated with Martin Cahill in some way. Certainly from the same school, probably from the same family. I must say I write about him with a large degree of trepidation. You’d think I might be scared about posting love letters from Arthur’s Cock and Everyone Shites? Not a chance. But writing about LOD in my blog; a whole different story altogether. In fact, there are droplets of wee wee coming out of my willy intermittently as I write this section.

I am firmly of the opinion that LOD will try to murder me when he reads this. If you are reading this LOD, please be advised that I have a three year old Doberman who is currently undergoing both defence AND attack training. In addition (and far more impressive in my mind), I hold a Purple belt in Kenpo Karate. Approach me at your peril, with extreme caution.

The Hackers Attack

One morning after I woke up from a nightmare in which I was being kneecapped by LOD, I was eating my breakfast whilst creeping on somebody’s pics on Facebook (as you do). What I saw in my news feed made me nearly choke on the piece of wholemeal toast I was masticating. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Take a look:

A Facebook post introducing one of OnlineGrinds.ie’s new teachers

The new OnlineGrinds.ie Facebook cover photo and a post with their complaints policy

It looked like my ex partners had completely changed their approach to delivering grinds. They had introduced topless teachers.

I admit, this was not something I had thought of when I was coming up with ideas for the company. So I thought “fair fucks to them, they may have a chance now”. Even if BS was still at the helm, this kind of semen change……I mean……sea change, would certainly ensure that their business would improve, if not thrive, forevermore. However, when I went over to the actual website to see the new line up of big boobed beauties in action, they were nowhere to be seen. The staff-room was still full of boring, non-descript, lacklustre, glasses-wearing, check shirt sporting, teachers from Ashfield College. No tits. No cocks. No action. No point.

It turned out that someone had hacked into the Facebook account and was bringing the expression ‘taking the piss’ to a whole new level. I wanted to make passionate love to this person, let alone shake their hand. To this day I don’t know who the hacker is. If you are reading this, hacker, please make yourself known to me. I would like to buy you an abundance of pints.

Some time later, I was on the OnlineGrinds.ie website to see how out of date it was. When I say out of date, I am not referring to the general design of the site; we all know that BS was going for the vintage look here (which he pulled off very well). I am talking about the site content itself. I was curious to see whether BS was spending any more time on the project now than he did when I was there. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to find any evidence of this. Indeed, it doesn’t look like he has worked on OnlineGrinds.ie at all since Easter. If you look at the site today, the 6th of July 2014, you will still see the words ‘New’ and ‘Easter’ on the homepage. Brilliant first impression for first time visitors to OnlineGrinds.ie.

Screenshot of website today

Anyway, while I was on the site, I took a trip down memory lane and clicked into the Student Ambassador Program (SAP) page. The SAP was a scheme I set up where students would receive cash for spreading the word about our company. As a Irish Indo journo once said, we were “injecting entrepreneurship into the secondary school system with this innovative scheme”.

We had a video embedded on the SAP page with yours truly explaining how the program worked. For reasons of nostalgia (as opposed to vanity), I clicked in to watched this video that we had recorded nearly 2 years prior. But when the video started playing, a strange empty box appeared in the centre of the screen. I hovered over the box and up popped a very strange, but extremely funny, message. Obviously the hacker had taken control of the YouTube account too. Take a look for yourselves (hover over the box in the centre of the screen – note: this only works on a desktop, you will not see the funny message on a smartphone):

The chances are that this video could have been live on the OnlineGrinds.ie site for weeks if not months, without anybody noticing it. It’s no longer there, however. So I guess a student probably noticed it in the end, in which case it was brought to the attention of BS (who was probably lounging in a hammock in Koh Samui at the time), and it was removed from the page 16 days later. BS wouldn’t have been sharp enough to see something like this himself.

Next Chapter – Breaking News

Chapter 19: 3K Any Good To Ya and EGM – Abrakedabra and Paul Is Gone

July 5, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

Results of Cunt Contest

As promised, I am including the results of yesterday’s Cunt Poll in today’s chapter. My sincere thanks to all 32 of you who have voted in the past 24 hours. If you are reading this and didn’t vote at the end of the last chapter, please take a second to go back to cast your vote. The poll will remain open and we will revisit the results at the end of the blog. Remember the poll is set up in such a way that only 1 vote counts per IP address. As much as you’d love to give BS hundreds and thousands of votes, sadly only 1 vote will count per person.

With an astonishing 62% of the votes, BS wins hands down as the biggest cunt in the blog. He received 20 votes. And no, these weren’t all from me. As I said, the poll only allowed 1 vote per person. If I was allowed to vote for BS more than once, his number of votes would have been in 7 figures, at least.

In second place, coming in with a not too shabby 25%, is MBB AKA CUNT. He received 8 votes. This is probably due to the information I ‘elected’ to release about him in yesterday’s episode.

Finally, with 13%, Sean wins the bronze medal. This was the most interesting result for me. There are some of you (4 people) who actually believe that Sean was a bigger cunt than BS and MBB AKA CUNT. I guess some of you think that Sean is a bit like a fart, in that sometimes the silent ones are the most deadly.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to my special friend Sam who has volunteered to bake a cunt cake for BS as a prize for winning the cunt contest. Once the cake is baked and iced I will take a photo and upload it to the blog before we have it couriered over to BS’s apartment. I would also like to congratulate BS on winning this coveted prize and for being the biggest cunt in this blog, and possibly of all time.

Incidentally, somebody viewed the blog yesterday from the Seychelles. If this is you, can you please identify yourself by commenting in the comment box below. Otherwise I will have to assume that BS is off sunning himself (again).

Now, back to the blog.

3K Any Good To Ya?

Weeks pass and still no sign of the legal action I was ‘promised’ in my last paper airplane. I was unsure what was happening. Would I or wouldn’t I have an exciting day in town shopping for a new suit, or would it be business as usual.

On the 21^st January 2014, over a month after receiving the Everyone Shites love letter part deux, I received this email from Sean:

Sean’s email regarding Loan Note. Note the presence of the word ‘assets’ and the absence of the word ‘business’.

So, what the hell did this mean? Sean was obviously willing to give me something, albeit a derisory amount. Otherwise he was going to transfer the assets of OnlineGrinds.ie to his company. Why was this? To what use could these assets be put in his company? The rest of the business; website, goodwill, IP, customer database etc. would still remain the property of Stenson Institute (trading as OnlineGrinds.ie). Why would he separate them? What would he do with the camera and broadcasting equipment ? Was he in cahoots with the dwarves to set up the first dwarf porn website in history? That would be a first, I suppose. Dwarf porn, hmmmmmm. I am becoming sexually aroused even at the thought.

Unsure as to what he was playing at, the insult of offering me €3k overshadowed this question. I replied back saying that I was not prepared to accept this pitiful amount, given the two and a half years work I had put into this company, not to mention the fact that the whole company was my idea in the first place.

EGM – Abrakedabra and Paul Is Gone!

On 27^th January 2014, I received the following:

I was confused. Sean & Co. now wanted to transfer the assets AND BUSINESS of OnlineGrinds.ie from Stenson Institute Ltd. to his company Moreland Investments Ltd. But hang on, this is not what he said in his email, nor is it what was outlined in the loan note. He can’t do this? The loan note says his company can have the assets, but it says NOTHING about the business. See relevant section in loan note:

Again note the presence of the word ‘assets’ and the absence of the word ‘business’.

If Sean & Co. were able to take the assets and the business from Stenson Institute and bring it over to Moreland Investments, they could simply pick up from where we left off and run OnlineGrinds.ie without me under the new umbrella of Moreland. It would remove me completely from the equation. I know you are thinking now that I was happy to be removed from the equation completely a few months back, but that was while I still had Learnology! Now Learnology was gone (because of Sean & Co.) and this ‘transfer’ would mean OnlineGrinds.ie would also be ‘taken’ from me.

As you can see in the EGM notice, they were proposing that the sale/transfer would be considered an ordinary resolution of the company. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s simply that the resolution could be passed at the EGM by a simple show of hands. So, Sean, BS and Cillian raise their pinkies and hey presto, Paul vanishes.

This worried me a little. But then I decided to take out the Shareholder’s Agreement to see if I could find any protection for me in here. The Shareholder’s Agreement was a load of legal horse manure. Again a document written in Arabic would be easier to understand. But I managed to pick out a section under which I was protected.

Here was my condom:

I know what you’re thinking and it’s probably along the lines of “What the hell does all that mean?” Well, my understanding is as follows:

In order for the business of the company (never mind the assets, Sean had rightful claim on these) to be sold to Sean’s company, there needed to be approval by the holders of 75% of the issued share capital in the company. As I owned 28.19% of the company, the max they would be able to reach is 71.81% and therefore the sale would not be allowed.

Phew! I was safe! There was no way this could be done.

However, the next day I got another email from Sean with an attachment entitled ‘Termination of the Shareholder’s Agreement’. See below:

The lads were really taking the piss here. How the fuck could they casually decide that the Shareholders Agreement be terminated, in a kind of ‘by the way’ type fashion? Surely this needed approval by me too?

As you can see at the end of the letter, they request my consent to transfer the business over to Moreland Investments. They did not have my consent.

Notwithstanding the fact that they didn’t have my consent, the EGM went ahead and both the assets and business of Stenson Institute Ltd. were transferred to Sean’s company, Moreland Investments Ltd. To this day I don’t believe that the Shareholder’s Agreement was legally terminated and therefore believe that the sale of the business of Stenson Institute, with or without my consent, was also illegal.

The fact of the matter is, the lads knew they were not legally entitled to either (a) transfer the business or (b) cancel the Shareholder’s Agreement. I called my solicitor and asked her could they actually do this. She replied by saying: ‘they can try anything Paul, the question is are you prepared to fight them”. By fighting them, she meant seeking an injunction to prevent them from doing this. I asked her how much this would cost, and she said that I wouldn’t have much change out of €15k.

Sean and BS knew that I didn’t have this kind of money to spare. So, fully aware that what they were doing was against the law, and safe in the knowledge that I didn’t have the financial wherewithal to block them, they went ahead and removed me from the company I founded, and carried on with the company, minus yours truly. I had now lost both Learnology and OnlineGrinds.ie.

Note:

Now that they had transferred the assets over to to Moreland Investments (which I admit was legal), they needed to physically get their hands on these assets. But where were they? You guessed right. They were in my gaff.

The tango was a dance I always wanted to learn. Now was a perfect time for me to take up this new hobby.

Next Chapter – Chapter 20: Give Me The Assets or You’re Fucking Dead and The Hackers Attack

Chapter 18: Bye Bye Learnology and The Jack & Jill Lollipop Story

July 4, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

Bye Bye Learnology

Being the incredibly stupid person that I am, I told the boys in Learnology about the ‘oops’ email and the potential joining together of Sean & Co. and Ashfield in holy matrimony. I thought I was doing the right thing by telling them. Despite my being wired to the moon and sometimes (often) a complete fuckin eejit, I’m an honest chap I am. In hindsight, I wish I had kept my gob-shite gob shut.

When I showed MBB the second love letter from Everyone Shites, he became very worried. I was showing it to him against a backdrop of pride, in a kind of “ha ha look what I received!” way. Unfortunately, MBB didn’t receive it with such joviality and rebelliousness. Why are some people so fucking square? We only live once. Life shouldn’t be about negativity and worry. It should be about adventure and excitement. MBB fell into the trap of believing that Sean & Co. could actually have a case against Learnology (I guess intuition isn’t a gift with which we are all blessed). This couldn’t have been further from the truth. There was no possible way that Sean could attach Learnology to any legal action they would take against me, nor was there any way they were going to take any action in the first place.

As you have read before, Sean’s rationale for harping on about their potential pursuit of Learnology profits was a bid to try to get us to ‘let them in’ to the company. No judge would buy into this bullshit if it ever went to court (which it wouldn’t). Later on in this chapter I will use the Jack & Jill Lollipop story to describe just why this case would have never been admitted into the wig and wing collar club.

A barrister wearing his wig. Imagine how fucking stupid you would feel wearing this

Regrettably, some of us fell for Sean’s bullshit more than others, namely MBB. On Thursday 9th December 2013, MBB wrote me an official email stating that he ‘elected to cease all involvement with Learnology Limited’ on account of ‘Learnology’s unnecessary risk of legal challenge’. I know what you’re thinking; why use the word ‘elected’? Why not just say ‘decided’, for fuck sake. In any case, regardless of his choice of words, what a gullible gob shite. In fact, he was so gullible that I no longer believe he is worthy of the title MBB (Mr Brain Box). I have therefore ‘elected’ to remove this esteemed title, and rename him the cunning, underhand, nasty, tosser (CUNT).

Why did Learnology collapse?

When CUNT ‘elected’ to withdraw from Learnology, he also ‘elected’ to withdraw the total amount of funds he had originally invested back in September. Bear in mind that 3 months had passed since he came on board, and we would have obviously used a portion of these investment funds to cover expenses thus far. But no no, this does not mean that he took back the remaining portion of his funds. For some reason he thought he could take back the full shebang. I often thank my lucky stars that he left when he did, because someone who carries on like this is not the type of person you want to work with on a long time basis. I just wish I hadn’t trusted him as much as I did, and I hadn’t let him be the only partner with access to online banking (who’s gullible now, says you).

Learnology was capitalised with a debt to equity ratio of 1:1, 50% bank debt (from BOI) and 50% investment funds (from CUNT). CUNT’s withdrawal of monies over and above what he was entitled, exposed us to the point that we were like Nigerian nationals in Antarctica, with no igloo or parka. His over withdrawal ate into our bank debt unnecessarily. He had fucked us (and the company) up no end. Luckily however, CUNT had signed a personal guarantee on the bank loan, making him joint and severally liable for that debt. Nevertheless, as we were now only capitalised by debt, no equity, we had to fold the company and wave goodbye to Learnology.

For anyone reading who had a child or relation in Learnology, I apologise. I apologise for the behaviour of CUNT (who robbed us), I apologise for the behaviour of Sean & Co. (who made the idle threat that led to us being robbed). Learnology looked like it was going places; we were the only low cost grind school in Ireland, meaning we had opened the doors to students for whom grinds had never before been an option. Finally, I apologise for my behaviour. I would love to sit hear and write that the whole situation was outside of my control, and that I was not at fault. The truth is I was at fault; I should have never been honest with CUNT about the ‘oops’ email, and I should have never taken on someone like him in the first place.

The Jack & Jill Lollipop Story

The reason why CUNT was wrong to assume that Sean would have taken us to court can easily be explained using my Jack & Jill Lollipop Story:

Jack and Jill before they decided they wanted to lick a lollipop

Cast (in order of appearance)

Jack = played by Paul

Jill = played by Sean & Co. (nominated for an Oscar)

Mary = played by CUNT

Mommy & Daddy = played by the High Court Judge

Props (again in order of appearance)

Yellow Lollipop = OnlineGrinds.ie

Red Lollipop = Learnology

One day, Jack and Jill are headed up the hill to fetch a pale of water. On the way to fetch the pale, Jack says to Jill “Hey Jill, will we go and get a lollipop?” Jill replies by saying “sure Jack, I would really like a lollipop right now”. Jack then advises that he has no money to buy said lollipop, so Jill agrees to buy the lollipop, subject to her being able to share it with Jack and benefit from the nutrition and nice taste it provides. Jack consents. They buy a yellow lollipop.

Having licked the top of the yellow lollipop, Jack says to Jill, “hmmmmmm, this lollipop doesn’t taste too good; it’s not really fulfilling our appetite, is it Jill?”. Jill doesn’t know any better, as she hasn’t been actively involved in the licking process.

Jack says to Jill, “let’s go and get a red lollipop instead, I believe they are much tastier and much more popular among kids”. Jill says she is “happy with this one, maybe if we keep licking it we will come to a tasty bit”. Jack says “no matter how much you lick, it will always taste the same”.

Jill is happy to stay with the yellow lollipop, and Jack gets a new red one. But Jack cannot possibly manage the new, big, red lollipop on his own. He needs help. So he asks Mary to help him.

Jack with his new red lollipop

When Jill sees how much Jack and Mary are enjoying the red lollipop, and how it has serious potential to fulfill their appetite, Jill wants to have some of it.

When Jill asks Jack and Mary if she could have some, Jack isn’t entirely against it, as he has always gotten along with Jill. However, Mary doesn’t want Jill to be part of the licking process.

Jill threatens to tell mommy and daddy and claims that both Jack AND Mary will get in trouble if they don’t let Jill in on the action. But if Jack and Mary let Jill share the red lollipop with them, Jill won’t say a word to mommy and daddy. But what will mommy and daddy think if Jill tells them but then Jack explains that Jill wouldn’t have said a word if she had been allowed in? Would this damage the entire credibility of Jill’s argument?

Would mommy and daddy tell Jill to stop acting like a spoiled child and ask her why she didn’t accept Jack’s offer in the first place? Whether Jack gets a slap on the wrist or not from mommy and daddy, how could they possibly find Mary to be deserving of a slap?

Jill with no red lollipop – the quintessential spoiled child

Despite the fact that mommy and daddy couldn’t touch Mary, she still gets scared shitless and spontaneously ‘elects’ to leave Jack to lick the lollipop alone. Such was the credibility of Jill’s threats (in her eyes). But when Mary leaves, the task of licking the lollipop is virtually impossible for Jack to do on his own, so he has to throw it away.

I know this lovely little story may seem a tad oversimplified, but the principle of the matter remains the same. There was no way Sean & Co. could go after Learnology, but as CUNT didn’t see this, we lost Learnology.

Thanks Sean & Co. Thanks CUNT. You guys are the best.

Quick Poll (it takes a nanosecond)

Please answer the following question. Complete anonymity is assured.

Results will be announced in tomorrow’s installment.

Next Chapter – Chapter 19: 3K Any Good To Ya and EGM – Abrakedabra and Paul Is Gone

Chapter 17: This Means War, Ignore The War

July 3, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

This Means War

It was now mid December and I suspected that Sean & Co. were anxious to get into bed with Ashfield, have sexual intercourse (I would call it fornication actually; weren’t they married to me after all) and give birth to their illegitimate baby (launch their business) in January 2014. The knowledge of the Ashfield relationship, and the child they were trying to have out of wedlock, was something I was going to keep as a secret between me and I.

I didn’t send the ‘tell not ask’ email immediately. I decided that there was a lot more time for mischievous hand rubbing and a lot more sweat left in the guys. So, I held my ground, continued to ignore emails and began to mentally formulate the wording of this legendary email I was going to send.

At this point I realised that there were a number of questions I forgot to ask Vito. I think I spent so much time trying not to poo in my pants in his regal office, that I lost sight of these vital questions. In hindsight, there was one question I should have asked after he had given me the nuclear weapon that was his 6 wise words. If I could borrow Marty McFly’s car for a few days and go back in time, I would have followed his 6 words with the reply: “at what price?”.

Was I going to place a value on it or was I going to let them come up with a figure? This was a difficult decision for me. If I aimed too high, I might damage any possibility of a buyout, if I aimed too low, I would be limiting myself if they paid out immediately. So, I decided to leave it wide open.

In reply to an email from Sean saying he needed to make a decision on his next move ASAP, I wrote the ‘tell not ask’ email. I left it open in that I didn’t place a figure on it. Here is the email:

My tell not ask email

The reply I got marked the first time in two and a half years that I had ever seen any weakness or vulnerability in Sean. You could read in his words that my email had shaken him badly. At least force 7 on the Richter scale. His reply was short, aggressive and full of fire. Here it is:

Sean declares war

The thought of going to court excited me. It meant I was going to have to buy a new suit. But I had never really been to court before, so I didn’t know what kind of suit would suit a court appearance. As it wasn’t an everyday occurrence, I wasn’t going to buy a boring black, grey or charcoal suit. This was a special, once off, occasion and it therefore deserved a special, once off suit.

After a bit of research online, I decided I would buy a suit like this for the big day:

Yes, this suit was perfect. Hat and all. Gadaffi was my idle when it came to suit fashion. I was weak at the knees at some of his ensembles. I even considered wearing earphones upside down on the day of my court appearance, just to finish off the look.

But alas, I knew this was just another idle threat on Sean’s part and researching suits online was simply wishful thinking. You can’t blame me though, we all like to fantasise at times, no? When I woke up from my day dream, and the reality of never actually getting the opportunity to sport a getup like this in the High Court hit home, I realised that there was in fact a silver lining to the dark cloud that was reality; I still had another solicitor’s letter to look forward to!

I love a bit of drama. And apart from anything else, the letter would also provide the means to make another paper airplane for my dog to chase. Endless hours of fun…FOR FREE. I was in my element (as was the pooch).

So, a day or two later, the parts for my new paper airplane arrived in the letter box. Here it is:

Here again you can see that the letter was signed ‘Everyone Shites’ rather that the individual solicitor who had written it. Too right though. Could you imagine the strange looks you would get from your pharmacist if you presented a prescription that had been signed by a vet?

Ignore The War

I never had so much fun making a paper airplane in my life. Usually when I play with the dog, I like him to bring me back whatever I have thrown down the garden. In this case, I didn’t want it back. He could eat it, excrete it, dance on it, make a doggy hat out of it, break it up into thousands of pieces and use the pieces as doggy toothpicks over the years, use the letter to taunt the dog next door, and so on and so forth. As long as he was happy, I was happy.

As Sean & Co. were expecting their baby in January, they really needed me gone ASAP. Remember it was mid December, the height of silly season. The last thing they needed was me to fuck around. If I didn’t sign the option agreement, Ashfield would have no comfort in knowing that I “was legally committed to leaving OnlineGrinds.ie” and the deal may fall through. This is why Sean had Daniel O’Donnell send me the second letter. He thought that I would freeze in the head lights and sign the document without hesitation. How wrong was he. But then again, he didn’t know that I was aware of the impending baba.

Despite my serious urge to reply to Everyone Shites saying that the firm of solicitors I was nominating was Saul Goodman and Co., I resisted the urge and ignored the letter completely. I let the 3 days pass to see what would happen. The days soon became weeks and low and behold nothing ever happened. Surprise surprise.

But how long were they willing to wait for me to sign the option agreement before it was too late to launch in January? Would they give in and pay me just before it reached this point? I didn’t have an answer to this question, as no more oops emails were sent. But I was willing to wait and find out.

In any case, it looked like Sean & Co. had no intention whatsoever of taking me to court as (a) it would cost too much and (b) they were much more at fault than I, and being in court would expose their wrongdoings much more than mine (especially because I didn’t have any).

In many ways this is why I have no qualms about writing this blog. The lads are much more guilty than I (you will see why as we get towards the end). This is why I can pretty much push the boat out in terms of what I say, with no fear of legal retribution from their end. Bearing this in mind, allow me to say one thing:

BS, you are, have always been, and will always be, an absolute and utter Bollox.

Writing this blog is far more rewarding than any form of conventional therapy. I recommend it most highly. I only wish I would receive an SL though. I have wagers with my mates that I will receive at least 2, and most probably 63. Whatever I do, I cannot lose this bet.

So guys, can you please get your act together, take out the thumbs that are firmly lodged up your bottoms and send me an SL without delay? Yes I am talking to YOU Arthur’s Cock and YOU Everyone Shites. Please don’t delay now. Good boys. Love you lots.

Next Chapter – Chapter 18: Bye Bye Learnology and The Jack & Jill Lollipop Story

Chapter 15: I Accept, We Don’t and The Stool Pigeon

July 1, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

After our meeting with Sean, the three of us (PWD, MBB and I) walked up towards Harcourt Street to perform a post-mortem. It took us approximately 23 seconds to come to the conclusion that bringing Sean & Co. onto the Learnology train was not an option. It was my job to break the news to Sean, and here is the email I sent him:

Sean was not a happy bunny when he received my mail, and a few days later he replied with the following:

As you can see, reading an email from Sean is a pleasure compared to reading one from BS. Not simply because it could take you the same time to read a PhD thesis, backwards, as it would to read one of BS’s emails, but also because Sean’s emails were emotion-free. He was always very composed and level-headed.

All correspondence from this point on was going to be with Sean. BS went to ground immediately after the Everyone Shites letter was sent. This was most probably because he was burying his head, but then again, maybe he was out of the country (for a change) and there was no internet coverage in Ulan Bator (he wanted to discover the other side of the world, he had already explored every nook and cranny that exists in the Americas, and that was during our 6 months of broadcasting alone).

A picture of BS in Outer Mongolia. As you can see, he’s been there so long that he’s beginning to look like one of the locals.

You may notice that Sean is still wearing his poker face in this email. He still makes out that he has a case against me, and more importantly, Learnology. He threatens to come after Learnology, if we didn’t ‘let him in’. I knew that this was a super bluff, but the guys in Learnology weren’t so sure. In fact, MBB was pretty shaken.

What did Sean want?

To get a clear understanding of what Sean wanted, I sent him an email in which I bluntly asked him what he wanted? He replied saying that there were a number of options, 7 to be precise. These were as follows (click to enlarge):

The were some similarities between these options and the options BS gave me in the last chapter. Having been given the option of relinquishing my shareholding in OnlineGrinds.ie and walking away from the company by both, and having been put under some pressure from my colleagues in Learnology, I decided that the time had come to take flight and get the hell out of OnlineGrinds.ie.

You would think that it would be very difficult for me to walk away from a company I founded and ran for two and a half years, with no return whatsoever. While I admit that it wasn’t easy for my pride, the truth is that my departure was somewhat tinged with relief. Relief that I didn’t have to interact with, or even see, BS ever again. Considering that the very sight of BS would make me gag and vomit incessantly for hours, I think it was best for my health that I departed (SL).

In addition, I was also acutely aware that OnlineGrinds.ie had no future. It had no hope of working, never mind success, for the following reasons: (a) Mammies are simply not ready to send Johnny up to his room to do grinds with ‘his computer’ (to that end, I’m not sure if online learning will ever work at secondary school level, if I’m honest). (b) Any company in which BS plays a role, silent, loud, present, absent, in the same country, in a different country, in the same galaxy, in a different galaxy, would not succeed. As long as BS was involved in a company, even in the most minute capacity, it would fail. If he walked into a company, stood in it for 6 seconds, breathed in and out, and walked straight out the door, the company would be cursed forevermore.

So, on 19^th October 2013 I wrote a very official ‘good luck’ email to the rest of the team in OnlineGrinds.ie.

We Don’t

My theory was that neither BS nor Sean thought that I would leave the pitch and hang up my boots. Even though it was an option they both gave me in their respective emails, I still believe the outcome they wanted, and thought they were going to get, was that somehow we would ‘let them in’ to Learnology. In the words of Alicia Silverstone, as if.

It turned out that my theory was correct. When I sent the email of relinquishment of shares, and my letter of resignation as director, I never received any acknowledgement. A number of weeks passed where I got no correspondence from them whatsoever. I’d say my resignation had literally gob smacked them and now they hadn’t a clue what to do without me, considering that neither of them had been actively involved in the company thus far (Sean because he didn’t need to be; he was simply the man with the money, BS because…… he was BS).

This now meant that someone would have to replace me i.e. be in the office virtually 7 days a week and be present for every single live broadcast. This was obviously not going to be Sean as he lives in the UK, and this was obviously not going to be BS (no need for qualification of the latter). They were rightly screwed. I suggest at this point they highly regretted giving me the ‘escape’ option (SL).

I eventually heard back from Sean in relation to my relinquishing of shares. In this email Sean states that he is ‘considering’ my relinquishment of shares, despite the fact that it was a clear option he had given me previously:

The Stool Pigeon

Approximately one month after sending my letter of resignation, I got a call from Sean. Sean basically reiterated that there was no real advantage (to them) in me leaving a company that had debts (why give me the option in the first place, says you). After a brief argument along the lines of ‘so it was okay for me to leave a month ago and now it’s not?’ Sean made a proposal to me.

He said he was going to get his solicitor to draw up an option agreement. The option agreement was a document that I would sign which would allow Sean and Co. to take my shares at any point over the following three months, at very short notice. If the agreement was triggered, they would take the shares and there would be no further threat of legal action. If the agreement wasn’t triggered, they could still take legal action against me (and Learnology) during the three month period.

At the time I hadn’t a clue what they were playing at. My initial reaction was one of non-description tinged with slight confusion, further tinged with not giving a shit. Having given the matter further thought and spoken to a few people who actually gave a shit about the whole agreement (a bit more than I), I learnt that this agreement simply amounted to Sean & Co. having their black forest gateau, and also consuming it.

They decided to renege on their original promise of allowing me walk away (without being sued) if I relinquished my shareholding, as they realised that the company couldn’t survive without me. They were now going to try and get another partner to replace me, and if they managed to find somebody within the next 3 months, the option agreement would be triggered, my shares would be transferred, and everybody would live happily ever after. I may go in peace to love and serve the lord, amen. In the case that they weren’t successful in finding somebody to replace me, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for them, as they would still have me (and Learnology) standing in the corner like a stool pigeon for 3 months, waiting to be sued.

A pigeon. Isn’t he nice?

The 3 month time frame was actually quite a clever move on their part, as it would give them time to see if Learnology was going to be successful or not. A lot can happen in 3 months, especially given that the school year only lasts 9 months. If they had seen that Learnology had done very well over the 3 months, they probably would have sued for damages and tried to claim Learnology profits.

When someone with much more sense than I explained the whole situation to me, I felt as used and abused as Solomon Northup. The kind of behaviour in which Sean & Co. were engaging brought me back to my days in the Merrion Hotel, a five star hotel in Dublin City. In any five star hotel you usually have a very special type of clientele. The type of people who walk around as if they are minted, yet they don’t have a penny to their name. The type of people who comment on the ‘beautiful nose and bouquet’ of a red wine, when it is probably corked. The type of people who eat caviar, yet they can’t spell the word. In other words, total tossers.

The feeling I experienced in relation to the option agreement wasn’t dissimilar to how I used to feel after presenting a bill to a guest in the Merrion Hotel. You would present the bill and then have to stand there like a complete and utter gob shite waiting for the guest to take money from his wallet, put it into the bill folder and hand it back to you. This process could sometimes take a couple of minutes, as the guest would continue to talk (bollox) to the others around the table, distracting him from the act of taking out the €50 note from his heavy-laden-with-other-clearly-visible-€50-notes wallet, and placing it in the bill folder, all the while without making eye contact or acknowledging your presence.

A waiter standing like a gob shite

If I had one very small request to ask of you, my beloved readers (all 7 or 8 of you): BE NICE TO WAITERS. They are, in fact, human beings. Don’t be an asshole when you are in a restaurant or bar. It’s already a demeaning job. They already feel like gob shites. Please make their work easier by treating them nicely. Before you make fun of a waiter or waitress the next time you are in a restaurant, put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Imagine how much of a twat they feel. Don’t make them want to call you a cunt. Respect them.

I realise that today’s chapter was a little downbeat. So to end on a lighter note, do you remember this video? Can anyone spot a Doberman?

Next Chapter – Chapter 16: OOPS and Buy Me Out Oh Baby Buy Me Out

Chapter 14: Let’s Get Dirty

June 30, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

Just when I thought BS had finished giving birth to a miniature BS, and his labour pains had subsided, he decided to let out another scream of pain. My initial reaction was that he was possibly having twins, and the second mini BS was about to pop. God, could you imagine a world with 3 BS’s. It really doesn’t bear thinking about, so I will shut up about that for now.

His second attack was far more powerful than his first. This time he had a full round of ammo in his weapon AKA his email account. Email was without a shadow of a doubt the weapon of choice for BS. He was very gifted and skilled in this form of weaponry. His email was like a semi-automatic firearm more so than a pistol, in that he wouldn’t simply fire one shot at a time; it would usually be a succession of shots, in very close proximity and at great speed. But when I say semi-automatic, I don’t mean an M16 or anything modern like that (contemporariness didn’t usually feature anywhere in his being), it was more like a vintage rifle such as the M1 Garand.

The M1 Garand

I am pretty sure that if BS had been in the hunger games and managed to get his hands on a laptop in the arena (with a pre-installed version of MS Outlook on it), not even Katniss would have been safe.

So, on 31^st August 2013, after a momentary lapse in correspondence from BS (which simply turned out to be an ammunition reloading period), round two of shots were fired. Below are some of the bullets.

Have a guess what he talks about in the first shot? You guessed right! Learnology!

In this shot, he gives me an ultimatum:

If you have read the previous chapter, you will know that a business plan was circulated to Sean. If you have read chapter 9, you will be aware that BS had no right to see the plan, as he had already resigned as a dickhead, I mean, director (sorry I keep making this Freudian slip). It looks as if the brownies had obviously poisoned BS again which resulted in a relapse of amnesia.

In this final shot he gives me a warning. A warning shot if you like:

Needless to say I stood my ground here and continued to advise BS that Learnology was not a competitive threat to OnlineGrinds.ie and that he had every opportunity to be part of it originally, but chose to turn down the opportunity. I also advised that his shooting down my ideas on how to further OnlineGrinds.ie on the basis of my starting Learnology was in effect preventing the course of progression of OnlineGrinds.ie.

Another Love Letter, this time from Everyone Shites

That weekend I decided to fuck off to Spain for a few days to lie on the beach, swim in the sea and spot some local talent. You might think that going away to Spain would free me of the BS of BS for a few days. But no, in Spain I still got bombarded with his eloquent emails, all relating to Learnology. In one of his emails, he decided to call an EGM (more amnesia, says you). I replied by saying that I would be delighted to attend the EGM, but if the subject of Learnology was brought up at the meeting, I would stand up from the table and walk straight out the door, allowing the team to pay for their own tea or coffee, as well as mine. In an effort to enjoy my few days away, rather than be tormented by BS, I chose to ignore the onslaught of emails that followed.

As the Ryanair flight was taxi-ing its way back to the terminal building on my arrival back to Dublin, I switched my phone on to check emails. One of the emails was from a large legal firm called Everyone Shites. Below is the gem of a letter that was attached to said email (click to enlarge):

Part 1 of letter from Everyone Shites

Part 2 of letter from Everyone Shites

When I received the Everyone Shites letter, I felt confused, frustrated and conflicted. I hadn’t a notion what to do. The feeling of indecision made me extremely vulnerable. I was weak. I needed help deciding my next move. But who was going to advise me on the options that lay ahead? There were just so many of them. If I chose the wrong one, I could regret it forevermore.

Each of the 10 or so options available to me had their fair share of both pros and cons. This didn’t make the decision any easier. I needed to evaluate all alternatives and create a shortlist of the 5 most suitable ones. The resulting frontrunners were as follows:

Would I?

(a) Place the letter beside the toilet and leave it there for a rainy day when I ran out of toilet paper

(b) Fold the letter and use it to prop up a leg of my kitchen table – I HATE wonky tables!

(c) Try to disprove the theory that you can only fold something a maximum of 7 times

(d) Crunch up the letter and use it as a ball which would provide endless hours of fun and entertainment for my dog

(e) Create a paper airplane with the letter which I could throw down the garden for my dog to chase. Would it come back to me? Could I create the first boomerang paper airplane in the history of time and mankind?

After an extended period of painstaking vacillation, I came to the conclusion that the potential of option (e) was so vast that I could not but choose it. In hindsight I made the right decision. Both my dog and I had immeasurable fun that day.

Am I Bovered?

In all seriousness though, did I need to care about this letter? Not at all. You may have noticed that the letter was signed ‘Everyone Shites’ as opposed to an individual lawyer’s name. I later found out (I am very resourceful) that the letter was written by a lawyer in Everyone Shites who specialised in company law, not litigation. Company lawyers and litigators are two different breeds entirely. This letter should have come from a litigator. Something just didn’t tally. It was a bit like a medical doctor treating a dog. He would know a bit about general animal anatomy from having worked with humans (as our guy would know a bit about general law), but it certainly wouldn’t have been standard practice for him.

The gentleman who wrote this letter was probably the kind of man who would have been educated in Clongowes Wood College and wouldn’t have finally moved out of the family home until the age of 36, at the very least. He was most likely the type of guy who would wear tartan trousers on the golf course at the weekend, and would only have a glass of Guinness in the bar after the game, as he was driving. His first car was most probably a VW Golf. Going for after-work pints on a Thursday would have constituted living dangerously for this man. He probably lived in a comfortable, but by no means pretentious, negative-equity-submerged apartment in either Smithfield or the IFSC, with his girlfriend Jenny (who was training to be a GP), and their bichon frise Lola (who was groomed every other day). In other words, this was a nice, understated chap who worked as an ordinary, decent, company lawyer. Not by any manner or means was he a blood-thirsty, man-eating, Saul Goodman-esque kind of litigator.

There is a big difference between nice company lawyers and evil, fire-breathing litigators. Different kettle of fish altogether. Daniel O’Donnell or Francis Brennan would make perfect company lawyers. Mike Tyson or Jason Statham would make amazing litigators.

Daniel O’Donnell – The Company Lawyer type

Francis Brennan – Another Typical Company Lawyer kind of guy

Mike Tyson – The Litigator Type

Jason Statham – Another Typical Litigator

So, realising that the gentleman who had written the letter was from the Daniel O’Donnell School of Law, as opposed to the Law School of Saul Goodman, I didn’t have much to worry about. He was probably a friend of Sean’s and this was the only reason why he was momentarily dipping his (little) toe into the dark world of litigation. In fact, if you read his letter closely, you can get the feeling that he is completely outside of his comfort zone. For example, he keeps repeating the words “to the extent”. Surely he wasn’t repeating himself so much on purpose, and it obviously represented a nervous twitch in his writing? The man was clearly shaking at the time. But would you blame him?

The long and the short of it was that this letter amounted to nothing more than an idle threat. A threat which they thought would result in my ‘allowing them in’ to Learnology. I felt like the bouncer of a night club, and this letter was like a very poorly manufactured fake ID.

I guess you would think that I would be shocked to receive a letter like this. You might ask yourself how these fuckers could do such a thing, considering I had given them every opportunity to be involved in Learnology, and they had turned down my offer. And especially when BS had clearly indicated that his time was up, making it physically impossible to set up the traditional grind school under the umbrella of Stenson Institute Ltd. t/a OnlineGrinds.ie. If this is how you are feeling, I won’t stop you from feeling this way. However, please be aware that I am not imposing this feeling upon you, you are feeling it yourself.

Subtext of Letter

If you have a pair of eyes in your head that function normally, you will easily see that the subtext of this letter was “Okay, I know we said before that we didn’t want to be involved, but we now think that this could be a success, so please let us be involved and we promise we won’t sue you!”

As Sean wasn’t getting involved in the same dirty tactics as BS, I wrote him an email to see what his take on the whole situation was. Sean was always very neutral and indeed didn’t dismiss the possibility of even investing in Learnology. In actual fact, Sean agreed to carry out a Skype call with PWD of Learnology and I at one point to see how the venture was going, (with a view to potentially investing down the road).

Sean replied to my email asking me to meet him for a coffee. What he said to me at the meeting was consistent with what I believed to be the subtext of the letter. It was along the lines of, “you can proceed with Learnology in an unencumbered fashion, with no threat of legal action, as long as you let us be part of it”.

To be brutally honest, I got on very well with Sean and I was never against the idea of having him on board the team in Learnology. So, I arranged a meeting with Sean and the partners of Learnology to see if some sort of arrangement could be arrived at.

At the meeting, Sean reiterated that Learnology could proceed, with no threat of legal action, if he and the OnlineGrinds.ie team could be involved. He mentioned that he was aware of the communication issues I was having with BS, and advised that BS would be a silent partner in this new arrangement.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t entirely happy with the idea of having BS involved in Learnology, silent, loud or otherwise. I would have preferred to chew ultra-thin glass, walk across white hot-coals barefoot and have rusted barbed-wire shoved into my eyeballs than have him in the company. However, if I rarely saw him in OnlineGrinds.ie (where he was supposed to be hands-on, as opposed to silent) there was no way I would even get a glimpse of him in Learnology. If he spent all his time in San Francisco and Mexico up until now, you could be sure he would be in Jupiter or Mars from now on. All the same, I still wasn’t mad about the idea that he would receive dividends from the success of Learnology, for doing sweet fuck all. Regardless of how I felt however, there were three partners in the Learnology team. If PWD and MBB agreed to let Sean & Co. in, who was I to stop them.

Towards the end of the meeting, the partners in Learnology posed one question to Sean. It was along the lines of “So, what do you think of Learnology?” All Sean could reply with was “The website looks good”. He had no notion of the business other than the fact that the website looked ‘pretty’. Needless to say, the partners of Learnology felt that Sean’s motivation was misplaced, and that all he wanted was a return on the money he had put into OnlineGrinds.ie (which ended up in the Ballymun bonfire). As a result, bringing Sean & Co. on board was regrettably not a runner.

Next Chapter – Chapter 15: I Accept, We Don’t and The Stool Pigeon

Chapter 13: BS gets mad jeal of my new biz

June 29, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

BS found out about Learnology through the old reliable grapevine that is Facebook. I didn’t mind him knowing about it though. I wasn’t hiding it at all. He was (note the use of the past tense) a Facebook friend of mine, and I would share Learnology stuff on my page all the time, usually annoying the fuck out of my Facebook friends in the process. So, why didn’t I care if he knew about it? Because I had clearly asked him and Sean to be involved, and they turned it down.

However, as soon as BS saw the awesome, state of the art website that PWD had developed for Learnology, the line-up of teachers we had put together, the pictures of all the students in the classroom on our launch day etc. etc., he threw the biggest hissy fit ever known to humankind.

I received a barrage of emails and a torrent of abuse asking what the situation was. He claimed that I was ‘going off’ with the developer of another online grinds website and had set up a business that was in direct competition with OnlineGrinds.ie.

Here is one of the beautifully worded and stunningly formatted emails that BS sent me in relation to my starting Learnology (click to enlarge):

Learnology was no more in competition with OnlineGrinds.ie than Crayola chalk was in competition with Kilmeaden cheese. Indeed, according to the shareholder’s agreement to which he refers, the definition of the business of OnlineGrinds.ie was as follows:

As you can see, the definition of the business of OnlineGrinds.ie is as precise and to the point as can be. It doesn’t even mention the word grinds or grind schools. It relates solely to online tuition and broadcasting platforms. Quick question: Had I set up another business providing online tuition that had broadcasting platforms? I think not. I had set up a grinds school with no online or broadcasting elements whatsoever.

Incidentally, as stated in an earlier chapter, a business plan entitled ‘Proposal for Survival’ was sent to Sean on Wednesday 3^rd July 2013. I guess BS was simply suffering from partial amnesia the day he sent that email, and the memory of him resigning as director of the company (which would result in him no longer having any say in the running of the company) had simply slipped his mind? Maybe our dwarves were plagued by a clan of brownies like in the movie Willow. Didn’t these brownies have some form of potion that could make you forget stuff? Yes, maybe somehow the brownies had come into contact with BS and had managed to put some amnesia potion into his earl grey tea. That MUST be the reason. It’s the most plausible reason I can think of, anyway.

The Brownies from Willow who carried a special amnesia potion

Just so you are sure it was BS who was given the amnesia potion, and not I, below is a screenshot of the email I sent Sean with the ‘Proposal for Survival’ Business Plan attached:

So what was up with BS? Why did he appear to be in extreme agony? Was he giving birth to a miniature BS? Were the Brownies attacking him with their teeny weeny spears? What ailed him, at all at all? My guess is that he was now beginning to regret not having listened to me about the traditional grind school idea, now that he could see that Learnology was going to be a success.

Going a layer deeper still, maybe he was really pissed off with himself for having stated that he was no longer willing to do any work in the company, making it impossible for us to set up Learnology under the auspices of OnlineGrinds.ie, in any case.

Whatever way you look at it, one thing’s for sure, BS was extremely, exceptionally, extraordinarily, exceedingly JEALOUS. On the count of three, everybody say awwwwww 1………. 2……….3 (click below):

At this point I want to reiterate one thing very clearly, and for emphasis I will make it bold, CAPITALISED, AND THIS TIME IN AN FABULOUS SHADE OF MAROON:

I HAD INTENDED TO CONTINUE WORKING ON ONLINEGRINDS.IE (AS WELL AS LEARNOLOGY.IE) AND WAS INTENT ON MAKING THE TWO COMPANIES SUCCESSFUL

Just because I was working away on Learnology.ie, this didn’t mean that I had left OnlineGrinds.ie behind. In fact, I was still intent on pursuing the next available option. Option B (the broadband provider deal) didn’t work out, Option D (the traditional grinds school idea) was turned down (but I proceeded in any case with a new team), but there was still one option remaining; Option B (the freemium model of online grinds).

It would work a bit like Spotify where the grinds would be free to all and made possible by advertising. Free grinds would work better because (a) parents wouldn’t pay for online grinds in the first place, and (b) the inevitable tech issues would be tolerated as the service is free. My biggest concern, which I made abundantly clear to my partners, was that we did not have the technical capability of developing such a site. BS would not be able to do something like this. It would be like an ant trying to climb Mount Everest (SL).

The various payment models of Spotify

How we would model ourselves on Spotify

I sent a proposal to the whole team this time (yes I guess I was feeling sorry for BS that day), but raised a serious concern that we didn’t have the technical capability to do something like this (which we hadn’t). A developer who specialised in websites of the vintage movement, fashionable and all as they may be, would not be able to come up with something like this.

The first person to reply to my proposal was BS. Here is his exact email:

The only acknowledgement of my new idea was that ‘technology wouldn’t be the issue’. There was no discussion apart from this. The focus of his email shifted firmly back to my association with Learnology.ie. This email amazed me to the point that I fell off my chair (again). I think ‘dumbfounded’ would be the most apt word to describe how I felt on receipt of this email. But why was I so gob smacked? Was it because his email was all about Learnology, Learnology, Learnology and because almost no attention had been given to the freemium idea? Meh.

The aspect of the email that I found much much much much much much more shocking (in a tremendously good, and most surprising way), was that BS had actually managed to write an email that contained only 2 lines. This was unprecedented. He had clearly beaten his personal best for the shortest email ever written in all time. What a feat. I was willing to buy this man a pint. This was an achievement worthy of celebration.

Realising however, that this email was very out of character, an aberration as it were, BS sent a second email a few minutes later. I can’t include his entire email here however, as I don’t think WordPress would have enough space on their server to include it all, but here is the general gist:

Yeah, I hear what you are saying, focus shifted back to Learnology again. As you can see, it got to the point that no matter what ideas I came up with to grow OnlineGrinds.ie, they were all shot down on the basis of my involvement with Learnology. Of course I have my suspicions that this may have been an attempt to cover up the fact that he would not be able to develop the freemium site. In any case, whether he had the wherewithal to develop the site or not is secondary, as he had already stated that he wasn’t going to do any more work for the company.

So, getting ever so slightly annoyed with BS now, I sent him an email saying that he needed to forget about my involvement with Learnology and that it was quite literally none of his business. I told him that we can’t let Learnology distract us from progressing OnlineGrinds.ie. Below is his response:

So, he had now confirmed a second time, that he was no longer going to carry out any ‘non critical work’. Note that he neglected to define exactly what non critical work was. As far as I was concerned, all his work was critical. He was the tech partner in a tech company, for fuck sake.

It now got to the point where BS was actually preventing me from furthering OnlineGrinds.ie. He had said he was no longer going to do any work, and whenever I came up with any new ideas for how we could get OnlineGrinds.ie out of the shit pit it was in, and into profitability, he would ignore these and perpetually focus on my involvement with Learnology. Needless to say we got nowhere with my idea of a freemium online grinds website. 3 options tried, 3 options failed.

Oh and guess what, in January 2014, an e-learning company called Alison entered the leaving cert grinds market with free online grinds, made possible by advertising. My freemium model idea was proposed back in the summer of 2013. Again, while I am not trying to blow my own trumpet, trombone or french horn, this was the second time that BS made the mistake of not listening to me.

Next Chapter – Chapter 14: Let’s Get Dirty

Chapter 12: Learnology – Say Goodbye to EGGS

June 28, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

Learnology was going to be the first grind school in Ireland to provide grinds at only €10 per class. But just because we were low cost, this did not mean that we would take short cuts in respect of teacher quality. In fact, Learnology was going to bring some of the best teachers and finest book authors in the country to exam students. Not only to Chloe and Greg from the leafy suburbs of D4, but also to Stacey and Jason from crime-filled Coolock. When I say low cost, in actual fact it’s not really low cost at all. It’s normal cost. There is no reason for Expensive Greedy Grinds School (EGGS) to charge any more than €10-15 per student, per class. Well……there is……GREED.

Take a well-known EGGS on Dublin’s Leeson Street. I won’t mention the name for fear of receiving another letter of love and affection from Arthur’s Cock. In fact…… fuck it…… one of my objectives of this blog was to see how many SL’s I could get, and I’m a man who stands by my word, so here goes: THE INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION AKA THE INSTITUTE AKA LEESON STREET AKA GREEDY BASTARDS (SL).

The IOE runs weekly grinds for secondary students who need extra help (and who obviously have cash to burn – must be related to the dwarves) on evenings and weekends. It charges its students approximately €35 per class. If you consider that there could be 60 innocent students sitting in (squashed into) a class, the IOE are pulling in €2,100 for EVERY SINGLE CLASS they do. Let’s assume they run 15 grind classes a week, that’s a whopping €31,500 A WEEK. And this is not their main business; this is simply the evening and weekend grinds I am referring to.

It is common knowledge that the IOE own their premises on Leeson Street. They have no rent to pay like other EGGS who have to pay hotels substantial rental fees for conference rooms to hold their classes. The main cost of running a class for the IOE is the teacher. Let’s assume, and let’s be generous, that they are paying their teachers €300 per class. This leaves them with €1,800 to play with. I realise of course that there will be overheads and tax to pay etc., but once these are deducted, you can be pretty sure that the IOE are making a healthy 4 figure profit on each class they run.

What do they do with all this money? Your guess is as good as mine. But I often have visions of the owners sitting in the basement of the building on Leeson Street, masturbating at the sight of the mounds of cash that surround them in whatever direction they look. Ben Dunne once said that Seanie Fitz was “addicted to money”, in my opinion the IOE have a fetish for cash. My premonition of the email from UPC came true, for all we know this could be true too.

One of the owners of the IOE playing in their basement. This is a mild form of playing.

A corner of the basement in the IOE

Considering that our school system in Ireland is so desperately shite that up to 73% of exam students need to do grinds (Student Enrichment Services Survey, 2010), the kind of rip-off strategy currently practiced by the IOE pisses me off no end.

My vision for Learnology was that we were going to charge a maximum of €10 per student to attend a class in our grind school. My strategy was that we would start off small in one centre in Dublin, and in 2 years from the date of inception, we would have centres in all the major cities (Learnology Regional) and towns (Learnology Local) across Ireland. We would start off with a universal charge of €10 per student, per class, and as we expanded across Ireland we would gradually reduce this to €5 per class, and still make a (moderate but by no means greedy) profit due to increase in volume. Learnology would be a national brand that would blow all the EGGS out of the water. Never again would a student, who had to do Irish or Maths grinds through no fault of their own, but as a result of a shite teacher in their own school, be ripped off by an EGGS.

Venue

Rather than locating somewhere in the Range Rover Vogue territory of south county Dublin, we needed to strategically locate ourselves in a venue convenient to all parties. Learnology was going to be accessible as much in terms of location as in terms of price. Having researched a number of venues, the one that seemed most suitable was the Alexander Hotel at Merrion Square. It was a short distance from the DART so that Greg could get to us from Dalkey, and Stacey could come to us from Harmonstown. It was a couple of minute’s walk from the Luas Green Line so Chloe could access us from Milltown, and just across the Liffey from the Luas Red Line so Jason could reach us from Fettercairn. We would also be served by the 46A bus which would bring Rory from Donnyrbook and Micko from Phibsboro.

Graphic from our website giving directions to Learnology at the Alexander Hotel from Leeson Street.

The room rental fees the hotel was charging were not cheap, but we managed to negotiate a deal. Under no circumstances were we going to increase student’s fees because of expensive conference room rates.

About a week before our official launch, the Alexander Hotel decided to fuck us over. I won’t go into detail here, but it essentially meant that we really didn’t want to locate there anymore. We decided to continue shopping around and contacted several colleges such as the American College Dublin (ACD) on Merrion Square (where I had been lecturing part time), DIT Kevin Street, DIT Aungier Street and finally, DBS on Aungier Street. ACD didn’t work out as I would have inevitably ended up strangling the lady we were dealing with, neither Kevin Street nor Aungier Street were suitable, as the classrooms weren’t good enough to put a pack of dogs into them, but at DBS, we struck it lucky.

We met with a gentleman in DBS called Tony. He resembled a security guard more than a business man, but who was I to judge, as I would have been wearing my usual mix of shorts and t-shirt that day (it was August). He showed us the best classrooms he had, and was willing to drop the price to whatever we said we were willing to pay. I have never done a sweeter or easier deal in my life. Shooting a sitting duck would have been a far greater achievement than doing a deal with security guard Tony. In fact, I was nearly going to ask him to put on my pink lycra tutu to greet students when they arrived on day one, which I am sure he would have done without any hesitation whatsoever. Such were the lengths to which he seemed willing to go to get our deal across the line.

DBS were looking for ways to generate extra revenue in periods of down time, and this seemed to be a perfect option for them.

The Learnology classroom at DBS

Teachers

During the summer of 2013, anyone who was anyone in the teaching world would have been contacted, if not hounded, by yours truly. Anyone who had written a textbook, who had outstanding ratings on ratemyteacher.ie, who had taught previously in EGGS, was targeted. Noone in the ranks of Ireland’s teaching elite was safe.

Having met and interviewed a long list of teachers, PWD and I arrived at our final line-up of teachers. Below is an image of our teachers, in addition to a short bio on each of them:

Far left: John Morris, HL Business – 25 years teaching experience. Blackrock College teacher. Former IOE teacher. Contributor to RTE’s “Countdown”.

Second from left: Dervla Murphy, HL French – 7 years teaching in Loreto Beaufort. Lived and worked in Paris for 5 years. Master’s Degree from Sorbonne University. Author of one of the most popular Leaving Cert French textbooks, ‘Tout Va Bien’.

Third from left: Peter Jackson, HL Chemistry & Biology – Head of Science at St. Columba’s College. Former IOE teacher. Over 30 years teaching experience. Corrected Biology papers and appeal papers for the SEC for over 25 years. Author of ‘Essentials Unfolded – Chemistry’. Has written Biology revision notes for mocks.ie. Teaches other teachers how to teach Chemistry in PDST.

Centre: Brendan Guildea, HL Maths – One of Ireland’s Top Maths Teachers. Has written both ‘New Concise Project Maths’ and the new ‘Less Stress More Success’ revision books for Project Maths. Taught maths, applied maths, and physics to both Leaving and Junior Cert students since 1973. Corrected Maths papers for the Dept of Education and various Universities. Appears regularly in the media leading discussions on maths teaching, exams and syllabus.

Third from right: Declan O’Neill, HL English – Examiner at both Junior and Leaving Cert Higher Level English. Chief Advising Examiner in Higher Level English at Leaving Cert Level. Has written and set state exam papers. Education Officer for the NCCA.

Second from right: Richard Barrett, HL Irish – Head of Irish Department in Blackrock College. He is a state examiner in both written and oral Irish.

Far right: Noel Cunningham, HL Physics – 20 years teaching experience. Teacher in Kings Hospital. Owns website http://www.thephysicsteacher.ie. Over 1 million hits on his YouTube videos. Corrects Leaving Certificate Physics Exam Papers. Awarded the Institute of Physics Teacher of the Year award in 2009. One of his students achieved the top mark in the country in Applied Maths in 2010.

RIP Joe Reville

Up until approximately one week before our official launch, the Biology teacher at Learnology was going to be Mr Joe Reville. However, one morning a few days before our launch I received a phone call to say that Joe had sadly passed away. Of all the setbacks we could possibly anticipate, this was never one of them. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, Joe was an absolute gent and a legend when it came to Science.

As you can see from the above, our show had a pretty stellar cast. And now, for once this calibre of teacher was going to be accessible to students of all socio-economic backgrounds.

Pricing

Having originally intended that we would charge €10 per student, per class, MBB managed to pull my arm and convince me that is was still ok to charge €15. After a bit of a scrap, we agreed on the price point of €15. Even at that it was still 60% better value than some of the EGGS.

Below is one of the flyers we sent to homes around Dublin which included our price comparison graphic. Said graphic featured extensively in our marketing campaigns:

One of our flyers which included our aggressive price comparison table

iNotes

As PWD was a wizard, who had worked in the area of eLearning for quite some time, he came up with the idea to make our class notes interactive. All other EGGS would provide boring, printed A4 notes, but we would be the first grind school to provide notes in a format that could be accessed on a tablet or smartphone. Elements of the notes would be animated, videos could be integrated, the answers to questions could be hidden and then revealed at a click etc.

Marketing

When it came to marketing and advertising, we usually used our price point as a weapon. We launched a full blown attack on EGGS, nearly to the point that we actually threw eggs at the EGGS. For example, one evening when an EGGS in south Dublin was running a free grinds evening, I sent our mascot, a cheeky monkey called Learnology Louis, down to stand outside the school and wave at students as they walked in. Below is a picture of Learnology Louis with his lovely t-shirt, taken right outside the EGGS by another one of our team on the evening of the free grinds:

Learnology Louis, our cheeky monkey, waving at students as they walked into a free session at an EGGS

The Co-Founder of the EGGS, trying to block Learnology Louis from students as they walked into their grinds

When the directors of this EGGS saw Louis coming, they rang me and started screaming down the phone. They even threatened to call the Gardai to get our poor little monkey removed. The problem was that the monkey was under strict instructions from me to stand OUTSIDE the hotel on the footpath and not to set foot on the grounds of the hotel itself. However, when the taxi driver was dropping the monkey to the hotel, he naturally dropped him at the hotel drop off point, which is technically on the hotel grounds. That’s where Learnology Louis was spotted.

The abuse that the monkey endured from the owners of the EGGS was traumatising. So much so that the he had to ring me and ask me what to do. When I received his phone call I was furious. I think I actually threw my Café Sol paper cup, half-full with extra strong, hot coffee, against the wall in anger.

The monkey had called me. Did this mean that he had removed his mask to make the call? If so, this would have been disastrous, the element of theatricality would have been completely ruined. But alas, he informed me that he was still wearing the mask and was speaking through the slit in the monkey’s mouth. Phew. Panic averted. What a relief.

The feeling of concern I experienced in relation to the lads from the EGGS abusing the monkey, and threatening to call the Gardaí, was about as significant as the feeling I experienced when BS told me he was resigning. In other words, non-existent. My only actual concern was that the monkey had taken off his fucking mask. That would have ruined my day and made me a very unhappy bunny indeed. So the general gist of my reply to Louis was “whatever you do, under no circumstances do you take off that fucking mask…… and don’t stop waving at the kids”.

The event was so profound that I actually ended up making a little video about it. In the video you can see footage of what actually happened that day.

Incidentally, the gentleman in the white shirt is actually a director of the EGGS in question, not an actor as most people think.

The Big Launch

Learnology launched officially in DBS on Saturday 7th September 2013. With some classes reaching up to 100 students, we were very happy with the turnout. The idea I had back in May, a mere 4 months prior, that I wanted my partners in OnlineGrinds.ie to create with me, which they declined, was now becoming a reality. From what I could see, this idea looked like it was going to work. And guess what? It would all happen without Sean and BS.

Some students waiting for their class to begin on the first day of Learnology

Yours truly, minus Sean and BS, on the morning of the launch of Learnology.

Next Chapter – Chapter 13: BS gets mad jeal of my new biz

Chapter 11: Back to Basics

June 27, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

When the deal with UPC didn’t pan out, I contemplated putting out a contract on BS. The quotes were vastly more expensive than I could afford, and represented very bad value for money, so I scrapped the idea and went back to the drawing board. Option B (the deal with a broadband provider) didn’t work, but there was still option D (the traditional grind school idea).

Being acutely aware of the quantum of cash a south Dublin grind school was making, I decided I wanted a slice of this pie. I therefore proposed to the partners in OnlineGrinds.ie that we go back to basics and develop a traditional grinds school where we would hire the best teachers in the country to come into a traditional classroom setting to deliver low cost, high quality grinds.

Online vs. Traditional

Having given one-to-one French grinds for over ten years, it is very easy to distinguish the student who is doing grinds because the mammy wants them to, from the student who is doing the grinds off their own bat. The ratio is approximately 4:1, in my humble opinion. Therefore 4 out of every 5 students doing grinds are doing them because of their mammy. The mammy has never, and will never, be in favour of online grinds. Why? To some extent because of cyber bullying, to a greater extent because of social media, and most importantly, because of internet porn.

There is a lack of control when you send Johnny up to his room to learn. You might think he is getting a lesson from stentorian Dr Clarke, but in actual fact it could just as easily be Miss Johnson:

Miss Johnson – The New Maths Teacher on OnlineGrinds.ie

The mammy would much prefer to rock up to Leeson Street or the Stillorgan Park Hotel in her SUV and drop off the kids, thereby offloading the control to a professional human (as opposed to computer), for an hour or two. They would be much more prepared to pay for this than they would for an online grind. So, if online grinds are to work, it is only for the 1 in 5 student. Considering grinds are not a necessity, and given the broadband we have in this country (not to mention the technical incapability on our end) (SL), this made for pretty slim pickings when it came to the online grinds business model.

The Range Rover Vogue. The vehicle of choice for moms dropping their kids to grind schools.

Listen Up

What I am going to say next is exceedingly important. Possibly one of the most important things you will read in this blog. It was my intention that we, i.e. Sean, BS and I, set up the traditional grind school TOGETHER. I gave them every opportunity to embark on this journey with me. I repeat, this time in bold, CAPITALISED and in an odd shade of violet:

I GAVE THEM EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO EMBARK ON THIS JOURNEY WITH ME.

As Sean was the only other director in the company, I sent him a business plan entitled ‘Proposal For Survival’. The basis of this plan was that we would go down the traditional route of human teaching, and broadcast the grinds online. Effectively, the money would come from the humans, and as we didn’t make any money from the online wing before, we probably wouldn’t here either, at least not for the next 80-90 years or so.

If I were to sum up Sean’s reaction in one word, I would use the word ‘meh’. For those of you who don’t know what this word means, here is the urban dictionary definition:

Given the fact that BS had unilaterally taken the decision to resign as director only a few weeks previously, I decided not to send him the business plan. Business plans are a privilege for directors only, and as BS had resigned, he was undeserving of this privilege.

When he got wind of the idea, he reacted in a similar vein to Sean, although his reaction was a little less indifferent. It veered more towards the negative. He did not want to divert from the business model of live and interactive grinds. He thought that this model worked just fine. But sure, why would he think any differently? If he had actually been present for more than one live grind, and actually in the country every now and then, he might have seen the light. But no, for some reason the Chief Technology Officer does not have to be present in the studio for live broadcasts (SL).

Another obvious reason (in my opinion) for his reluctance to embrace the new model was that it would most probably require extra work on his part.

Despite the fact that he wasn’t a director of the company, he still made his opinion on the traditional grind school be known. As you can see below in another one of his enchanting emails, he tells me I “need to park this offline school plan” and concentrate on “getting more money into the company”. He must have thought that the dwarves were bored shitless and needed something to do. In fact, I was convinced that his motivation for getting in more money was to keep the Ballymun bonfire alight and the dwarves in gainful employment. Surely he couldn’t have been as deluded as to think that there would be any other destination for this money???

Incidentally, he also reiterates that he has no intention of doing any more development work. See below (click to enlarge as usual):

Excuse me for a minute. I just need to pick myself up off the ground and settle into my seat again. Did I just read that he would be able to meet up at some point the week later? I mean, we wouldn’t have to wait a couple of months before we were graced with the presence of one of the most important partners in a company? The tech partner of a tech company?

Anyway, I am now left with a decision. Not an easy one. I founded a website. Took on a loser to develop it. The concept failed. We lost 64 grand. I now needed to start something new and get a return on my investment of nearly 3 years sweat equity as well as a return for our investor Sean, who put in €80k of his own money. A return for BS wasn’t top of my priority list, as a return implies that something was invested in the first place (SL).

So, my partners do not want to go down the road of a tried and tested model and start to actually make money for a change. They want to continue along the path of futility. What do I do? What I do is I truck on with the idea. If I can’t get my own partners to start the school with me because (a) they are not interested and (b) BS has clearly advised he is no longer willing to work, I find other people who are. Please note however that this did not mean for one minute that I was abandoning ship. I was intent on starting a traditional school but was not going to let my partners prevent me from doing so. Just because they didn’t want to join me didn’t mean I wanted to leave them. I had absolutely no intention of leaving OnlineGrinds.ie. Its success was still as important to me then as it was the day I founded it. Even if the lads didn’t buy into the traditional school idea, and despite the fact that BS was no longer willing to work, I was sure there were other avenues to explore with OnlineGrinds.ie, and miracles that could be performed therein.

But let me reiterate one more time, and my sincere apologies for my repetition, but it has to be said:

Regardless of whether Sean thought it was a good idea or not, given the fact that BS was not going to do any more work, there was NO WAY WHATSOEVER that the traditional grind school could be set up by Stenson Institute Ltd., trading as OnlineGrinds.ie. I had NO CHOICE but to look outside the company for help to achieve this goal.

So, I met with an actual web developer who shall remain nameless. For now let’s call him proper web dude (PWD). There was one main difference between BS and PWD; PWD was actually good. He was the type of guy I should have taken on in the first place. He was a hoody-wearing, idea-generating, beard-inhabiting, intelligent, bright, articulate guy. He was excited about challenges and could always find a way of developing whatever website functionality you wanted, regardless of the technical scope. He relished the challenges I gave him, and the ones he gave himself. He was an owner of the business. Its success was as important to him as it was for me. Whenever I gave BS a task to complete, he would reply with two words, “Phase Two”. Everything we wanted him to do was put on a list called “Phase Two tasks”. He would not work on any of these tasks until we entered Phase Two of development (SL). Needless to say Phase Two never came. With PWD, I would give him a task and it would usually be done sometime that afternoon.

So now that I had a PWD for the traditional grind school, we needed money. We put up a proposal on a number of investment networks and within a week or two we had an investor on board. He was younger than us, but had brains that were literally bursting out of his head. His head was a rather odd shape, but I always put this down to an over presence of neural tissue within his skull (SL). For the purposes of this, let’s call this man Mr Brain Box (MBB).

MBB was relatively square, certainly not the type of bloke you would find off his head at Electric Picnic. But where he lacked in his ability to let loose, he made up in multiple measures in his ability to compute and develop complex spreadsheets. He was an ace when it came to finance, and as tight as a granny’s crack. He would never pay a bill until at least the second demand. Even the money I spent on my lunch would be scrutinised and examined with a fine tooth comb. Gone were the days of going to Canal Bank Café for my usual staple lunch of chicken wings. It was a €3 chicken fillet roll in Spar from here on in. MBB was just what we needed.

A gentleman not dissimilar in appearance to MBB

This line up of PWD’s technical expertise, MBB’s financial competence and my semi-dangerous marketing skills, made for a pretty stellar team. Having come up with a number of different names for our business, we decided in the end to call it Learnology.

Next Chapter – Chapter 12: Learnology – Say Goodbye to EGGS

Chapter 10: New Ideas and a Possible Deal with UPC

June 26, 2014July 7, 2017 / PaulVStenson / Leave a comment

New Ideas

Despite all the negativity I have asserted in relation to the live and interactive online grinds business model, the company DID generate SOME money. In fact, we made the guts of €16,000. Not bad considering we invested €80,000……or……wait a minute……that’s a loss of €64,000……hmmmm……perhaps not so good after all.

One of our Junior Cert students could probably tell you that a business model such as ours was not sustainable. So, something drastic needed to be done. We needed a new plan. Rather than drawing up a plan as to how many hours I would work and how many I wouldn’t, I decided to come up with some new ideas for the company. These were as follows:

A – Review the model of live and interactive grinds – develop a freemium model

If you remember back to our free trial grinds, we got 70-80 students logging in to watch each class. This was partially due to some students logging in to extract the urine from their own teacher, the most eminent, stentorian doctor, but largely due to the fact that these grinds were free. Free grinds would work wonders. Why? (a) The mammy is not going to pay for them anyway and (b) the multitude of tech issues that will inevitably arise would be tolerated, as the service is free. So, if you have paid to watch a geography grind, and it cuts out half way, never to return, you can simply leave the site and go have much more fun on Xtube. Everything is hunky dory; there is no real worry, as the service was free in the first place.

So, if we could make all our classes free and monetise with advertising revenue, this could potentially work, in fact I was pretty sure it would work. If we started with 70-80 students logging in, we could potentially end up with thousands watching for free. But did we have the technical capability to develop something like this, tech-issue free? Even if we did have the capability, was our tech partner willing to put in anymore work? Both of these questions are rhetorical, obviously.

B – Set up meetings with broadband providers and do a deal along the lines of Eircom Study Hub

For those of you not familiar with Eircom Studyhub, it’s a service available to Eircom customers where exam students can access video tutorials as part of a bundle. The videos are provided by a company called Exam Support (hi John if you are reading, big hug) but they are recorded as opposed to live (the sensible approach). Students who are not with Eircom can pay a small fee to Exam Support to watch the videos.

Could we partner up with another broadband provider? The obvious partner at the time was UPC. They didn’t have anything education-related in their portfolio, they were the only provider of fibre power broadband (at the time), and most importantly, they wanted to be ahead of Eircom at every bend. And what better way to achieve this than to enter the education space with live online grinds where students could ask questions in real time, as opposed to recorded videos with no interactivity.

C – Focus on other disciplines – the grinds industry was limited to Ireland – TEFL online, adult learning, corporate training

No matter what we would do to try to make our business work, or what we would be restricted from doing technically, one thing was for sure: the grinds industry was a limited pot. It applied simply and uniquely to Ireland and was only worth €40m p.a. If we wanted to really make money, our business would have to reach further. Our focus needed to be global. But given the fact that BS had put a limit on his time commitment already, and was not willing to put in any more work, we were stuck with the IT infrastructure he had already developed. If we were to enter new global markets (such as TEFL online), we would need to use the website framework already in place for OnlineGrinds.ie. For those of you who have read the book The Lean Startup and who are familiar with the term Minimum Viable Product, we didn’t have an MVP.

D – Do away with the online element, go back to basics with a traditional grind school

Being acutely aware of the quantum of cash being generated by south Dublin bricks and mortar grind schools, and being equally aware of the Irish-dancing dwarves fucking our cash into the Ballymun bonfire, I decided that maybe online grinds wasn’t the way forward. Maybe we needed to go back to basics and start a traditional grind school, with human being teachers as opposed to computers. Could we start a traditional grind school and possibly broadcast the grinds online? This was an eminent possibility.

Possible Deal with UPC

Of all the above options, some seemed more feasible than others. B and D seemed to be the most doable. So, I began with option B. I approached all the major broadband providers single-handedly. I am not saying I did this alone because I want to blow my own trumpet, or because I am looking for praise, I simply want to point out that BS had no involvement in approaching these companies, or coming up with any ideas on how to further the company generally.

Having made contact with all the major providers, I heard back from one a day later. It was QSAT broadband, Niall Quinn’s company. We met with a guy from QSAT out in the Red Cow hotel and had a very interesting chat on how our two companies could work together and how we could potentially enter the North African market and bring online education to the folks down there. This was exciting. So, all QSAT needed were log in details so they could see how our system worked. We gave them a log in, but alas we never heard back from them. I wonder why. Could it be that there were tech issues? Your guess is as good as mine, but I distinctly remember around this time that there were major issues with our archive. The user kept getting the error message ‘Error Loading File’ and no video would play. Absolute disaster. To this day I wonder is this why we never heard back from QSAT.

A few weeks later, I was paying for a few shirts at the till in M&S on Grafton street and I heard a dog barking. It wasn’t a poodle shopping for slim fit shirts, it was the ring tone on my mobile. I answered the phone and there was a gent called Kevin from UPC on the other end. He wanted me to come in to UPC HQ to have a chat about a possible deal.

Despite much of an urge to pee in my pants with excitement, I managed to hold it in. However, I am sure the girl behind the counter thought I had just received a phone call saying that my lotto syndicate had just struck it lucky, or something along those lines. Such was the message the grin on my mug would have given off.

Kevin asked me to bring my tech partner along on the day, and as I don’t have a degree in email writing and feel much more comfortable relaying messages over the phone, I picked up the mobile and called BS. The appointment was entered into the diaries on my iPhone and BS’ Samsung Galaxy (he doesn’t do Apple – another reason why he was never a real developer).

On the morning of the appointment, suited and booted, BS collected me in his convertible Audi, roof down and all. We were men about town and we were going to do a deal with one of the biggest players in Irish broadband. We were invincible. And for a number of minutes, I was able to put the BS of BS to one side and concentrate on what lay ahead; riches beyond our wildest dreams.

We met with Kevin and showed him what we did. I spent the majority of the meeting worrying that he may not have been au fait with the vintage website movement that pervaded the industry at the time, and that he may have been unimpressed by the fact that our website looked like it had been designed back in 1992. However, he seemed to like the look of the site and the concept generally. Luckily he was aware of the new trend.

After about a 20 minute chat, Kevin announced that he would go and pretend to be a student for a while, watch a few live and archive grinds, and get back to us in a few days. With this declaration, something in the pit of my stomach began to feel very heavy. I began to feel quite unwell. The feeling of déjà-vu I experienced was so intense that I think I actually had a black out, with no drink taken. When I woke up from this momentary, hellish-nightmare-filled black out, the voice in my head was shouting at me (it normally spoke). The crux of the message was: “Remember what happened with QSAT???”. “Oh fuck”, I said (to myself).

Low and behold, a few days later, we received an email from Kevin in UPC. Below are his EXACT words along with the screen shot he sent via email:

Exact email from Kevin in UPC

Screenshot attached to Kevin’s email

I really wish I could say I was surprised and taken aback by his email. Unfortunately, I can’t. During my black out in the UPC offices, I had a premonition. In this premonition was a vivid vision of this email. The email I received from Kevin resembled the vision so closely, that I’d swear I have clairvoyant tendencies and am considering taking up a new career as Mystic Mike.

Premonitions, visions and hellish nightmares aside for a minute. For a student (the user) to get an error message like this, or worse again, their parents (the customer), with no reasonable explanation given, is catastrophic. But for a guy from one of the biggest broadband providers in Ireland getting this error message? The word doesn’t exist; at least I am not familiar with any word which would appropriately describe the gravity of this kind of fuck up.

Needless to say the deal with UPC never panned out.

Next Chapter – Chapter 11: Back to Basics

Paulie's Bog

"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men"

Paul Stenson

Chapter 20: Give Me The Assets or You’re Fucking Dead and The Hackers Attack

Give Me The Assets or You’re Fucking Dead

The Hackers Attack

Chapter 19: 3K Any Good To Ya and EGM – Abrakedabra and Paul Is Gone

Chapter 18: Bye Bye Learnology and The Jack & Jill Lollipop Story

Chapter 17: This Means War, Ignore The War

Chapter 15: I Accept, We Don’t and The Stool Pigeon

Chapter 14: Let’s Get Dirty

Chapter 13: BS gets mad jeal of my new biz

Chapter 12: Learnology – Say Goodbye to EGGS

Chapter 11: Back to Basics

Chapter 10: New Ideas and a Possible Deal with UPC

Give Me The Assets or You’re Fucking Dead

The Hackers Attack

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