I’ve always known that I have no poker face. This fact is a point of pride for me. Although on the rare occasion when I want to negotiate with a car salesman, I generally end up getting screwed, I appreciate the fact that people almost always know what I’m thinking. (I hope they appreciate it too.) Forget wearing my heart on my sleeve; my feelings are plainly written across my face.
I learned today that I also don’t have the equivalent of an online chat poker face. A witty salesman named Simon—analogies to Simon Says and the Pied Piper are suddenly running through my head—got me to give up some information today that I wanted to keep to myself. It turned out well in the end. But had it gone the other way, I could have learned a very hard lesson about my online privacy.
It all started out as an innocent chat. We were just talking (boy, if I had a nickel for every time I used that line as a teenager…). That’s how it always starts. Just talking. I was researching a merchant account provider for a client’s new ecommerce site. This is a thing I know almost nothing about: the back end of credit card processing for online retailers. And I wasn’t in the mood to talk to a salesperson. So I took advantage of the online chat feature. Simon eagerly popped into that happy little window docked in the corner of my browser. He answered all of my questions and then asked a few of his own. When I asked about higher education discounts, he asked what school I was referring to and what they were selling. I answered the latter question and declined to answer the former. The answer to the product question is digital downloads. Simon understood that I couldn’t divulge the name of my client. And he seemed genuinely interested in the digital downloads.
“Very green,” he typed.
I sent him back a smiley face. He took that as encouragement and buttered me up by asking, “Are you interested in our partner program?” He explained that if my client bought their service, I would get a commission.
I typed, “I think that would violate the terms of my contract with them. And they are a law school, so I probably shouldn’t mess with them. Thanks for asking. But no thanks.”
He laughed in reply and was understanding once again. “We work with lots of universities. You may be able to negotiate discounts with our enterprise team.”
“Great,” I typed. That was helpful information and it got them on my shortlist.
What I didn’t realize was that Simon had me right where he wanted me. And then he pounced. “Can I get your name and email for my boss? So we can send you an email with his contact information.”
I typed my email address and let him know I would have my client contact his boss directly. A split second later, the following words appeared in the popup window. As I read the words, the happy ding sounding the new message suddenly sounded like funeral bells: “if it’s [Acme University] my boss is going to @#$! himself.”
My mind raced. It stopped. It started. How did…What did I…What the f…. With a brief pause for me to giggle and think, Did he really just…? And then back to panicking, Hmmm…Email…Oh, my Web site…Dammit! It took Simon approximately 0.4 seconds to go from my email address to the name of a major university that I work with. Extract the domain name from the email address, put a www in front of it, stick it in a browser, and hit Enter. One click to the About page and there it is.
It took another 0.4 seconds for me to beat myself up and formulate a response. Rather than confirm or deny, I went with the un-denial. I replied, “no comment.”
That earned me another smiley face and a very eager inquiry regarding what other questions he could answer for me. We chatted a bit more and I pondered whether I had done the right thing for my client or if I had been naively duped by a clever 23 year old salesboy. (For the record, I have no idea what Simon looks like, but I’m imagining a young, floppy-haired, techie, hipster who rides a bike to work and listens to bands I’ve never heard of.)
As I write this now, I realize the part that really stings is that I reluctantly learned two lessons I would have preferred to avoid. 1) That my clients really do have legitimate reasons for asking me not to list their names on my Web site. And that they are in fact looking out for their best interests and not in fact trying to screw me out of taking credit for the really good work I do for them. Sigh. And 2) I now know what it feels like to be completely disarmed by some flattery, a little witty banter, and a clever boy with a better online chat poker face than I’ve got.
“You flash that smile and make your clients do what you want them to do, even when you’re wrong,” Best Tech Guy said to me once. “Turnabout is fair play,” Mr. Snarky says to me often. Is it really?
In this case, my openness worked to my client’s advantage. Simon used his powers for good, and his boss offered them a juicy discount. But it could have gone the other way. My inadvertent disclosure could have made the prospective vendor see dollar signs. I would have wasted my client’s time. I could have looked like an ass for recommending a vendor that attempted to overcharge my client with malice aforethought. And it would have been entirely my fault for trusting in all this internet stuff. But hey, I sort of have to, right? I’m adding this to the list of occupational hazards. If I don’t fully embrace the technologies and communities I help design, then I would be a hypocrite who’s not very good at her job.
Visualizing Shakespeare 