Bob Young on Nostr: Here’s one little vignette that helps explain why Wireless Advocates suddenly ...

Here’s one little vignette that helps explain why Wireless Advocates suddenly shuttered its operation in 2022. (Background: until then, they were the retailer that managed all cell phone sales in all Costco stores. Same thing for all military base exchanges).

I was brought in from outside in a joint role as CISO and Director of Infrastructure in January 2020. As Director of Infrastructure, I also had oversight of the Help Desk, providing support to our sales staff in the retail locations.

Recall that this is right before COVID. None of us knew what was about to happen.

I reported to the CIO/VP of IT. We’ll call her Lorna.

During my first week, Lorna took me to the Sales Dept and introduced me to the VP of Sales. Let’s call him Mark.

As Lorna put it, “Mark has something he wants to run by you.”

In the Sales Dept they had a complete, full-size mockup of a Costco in-store kiosk. They used it to determine layout, shelf space, displays, etc., and then sent the plan-o-grams out to the store locations when there was a change. There were two point-of-sale terminals at each kiosk, located on diagonal corners from each other. These POS terminals were just Windows PCs running emulators, with a credit card reader attached. The monitor was just above a horizontal shelf that ran all the way around the kiosk. The keyboard and mouse were on the shelf. All of the remaining shelf space was used to display phones and advertising placards.

Mark showed me all of this and then got around to his point. “I’d like you to replace the full-size keyboards with mini-keyboards. I can get two more advertising cards on the counter when you do this.” Mark explained that we received ad revenue from the carriers for every ad placard. I was speechless for a moment. This was so ridiculously stupid I couldn’t believe anyone was serious.

My boss, Lorna, was standing right there. She didn’t give me a clue what this was about. This was during my first week, maybe day two or three.

I tried to say something that sounded rational, and that didn’t sound like he was a blithering idiot. I said, "I can’t justify the expense of replacing working keyboards with other keyboards.”

Mark said, “I’ll pay for them out of my budget.”

Thinking to myself, “This is effed up,” all I said out loud was, “Well, I’ll evaluate some products, come up with a total cost, and get back to you.” He seemed happy with that.

I stalled. I simply took no action. There were far more urgent matters to attend to. I was curious to see how long it would take for Lorna or Mark to bring it up again. It did come up sometime later, so I assigned it to my Help Desk Manager to do the research.

Then COVID hit. This may be the only good thing that came out of COVID. All the Costco stores shut down, and when they re-opened there were limits on the number of customers that could be in the store at one time. Foot traffic at our kiosks dropped to near zero. No revenue meant no spending, so Mark had no funds for the Great Mini-Keyboard Project. No one asked me about it again.

Here's what I wanted to say to Mark, right in front of Lorna, at that first meeting. “So Mark. I’ve never met you before today, but I know quite a bit about you. I know that you suck at your job. I know that sales are abysmal, and the CEO is blaming you. I know that you’ve tried everything you can think of to boost sales, but you’re just not able to do it. So, out of sheer desperation and lack of reasonable ideas to actually sell phones, you’re frantically trying to gain a little more revenue from advertising. But, Mark, you weren’t hired to sell advertising. You were hired to sell phones.”

In my imagination, I continued. “Mark, I’ve got sales reps in the kiosks right now complaining about the existing keyboards. They want bigger, ergonomic keyboards – you know, those keyboards with rolling hills and valleys and a big space between half the letters and numbers.” (Of course, I hadn’t talked to anyone in the stores yet, but I can tell you from long experience that if you have several hundred employees, some of them want ergonomic keyboards).

“They want full-size, ergonomic keyboards, and you’re telling me you want to replace standard keyboards with itty-bitty keyboards that will give everyone carpal tunnel. And all because you suck at your job and can’t figure out how to do what you’re supposed to do, which is sell phones, not advertising.”

A few months later there were massive layoffs, including several people in upper management. In my capacity as Director of Infrastructure, I’d had several uncomfortable talks with Lorna about the company’s technical debt. There was no money to fix it. In my capacity as CISO, I’d had several uncomfortable talks with her about our security posture. Same thing – no money. So no one was surprised when I was judiciously selected as one of the layoff casualties. I was glad to go. They were glad to say goodbye.

It had no adverse effect on me. I reopened my consulting business, reinstated my commercial and professional liability insurance policies, and I was up and running. I skated through COVID working from my home office, mostly as a network architect for California Department of Transportation (CALTRANS).

Then, in December 2022, I saw an amazing news item: Wireless Advocates had ceased operations, overnight. Even Costco didn’t seem to know in advance, though I have to wonder about that.

So Wireless Advocates never recovered from COVID. Their VP of Sales never figured out how to do his job. Their CIO never solved the problems with technical debt. They were apparently freakishly lucky with no cybersecurity breaches, because that network was riddled with vulnerabilities.

My takeaway from that experience is that when a company is dysfunctional, it’s dysfunctional through and through. It isn’t just one dysfunctional department. It’s systemic rot, affecting the entire tree, from roots to leaves.