Stolen Ideas
In December 2017, I applied for an economic development job. I didn't get it and it led to mountains of drama.
The story starts in September 2017 when I finally got myself off the street and back into housing after nearly six years of homelessness. I moved to a small town near the coast.
While at the library one day, I saw some brochures that had cool map-related website addresses on them. I checked out the websites and they were all owned and run by a local community development organization called Our Aberdeen. Their website said they had a meeting once a month and it was open to the public.
The listed address was essentially directly behind my apartment. I had wanted to be an urban planner and now that I was back in housing I wanted to get a life, so I decided to check it out.
No one ever showed up. This was now early October because meetings were monthly and I had arrived in September.
I emailed them and learned the information on the website was out of date. I was given a correct address for the November meeting.
But the first address was a meeting place for a different community development organization, Aberdeen Revitalization Movement, and I also attended their November meeting.
I'm not shy and I'm not ashamed of having been homeless, so I blathered on like a drunken sailor about being newly off the street. And I was dressed in an appalling fashion.
In early December, having been up all night with insomnia, around 5am I decided to check their website to see when their December meeting was. Lo and behold there was a job listing for my dream job.
It had closed five days earlier and some of these people had already met my skank ass and learned I was newly off the street, so there was no way in hell I was getting this job. But doing stupid stuff after being up all night is my version of drunk dialing so I applied ANYWAY because I had never seen such a perfect "We actually wrote this job description JUST for Doreen Traylor!" job listing and I figured I would never have another shot at a job in my field since I don't drive anymore and most jobs in my field explicitly state "Driver's license required."
These fools neglected to say "Fuck you in particular. No non-drivers allowed." Their office was directly behind my apartment and the area they covered was the downtown area only of a town of about 16,000 people. I felt I could do the job without driving.
But since it was clearly a DOOMED effort and I didn't even expect them to politely ACKNOWLEDGE receiving my application five days after the closing date, I didn't bother to spend much time and effort on it. I tossed a decade old resume at them that I could not figure out how to edit and an incomplete application.
To my shock, they wrote back and the email did not say "Thank you for your interest but this listing is closed. We are no longer taking applications." Instead they asked me for the missing information.
I made the first round of cuts and was later asked to submit my plan or vision for development. I did not make it to the interview stage. They hired a local who graduated high school there decades ago.
In the meantime, I had begun working very part-time for the other community development organization, Our Aberdeen. I took over their websites and some other functions and was being paid $100 a month.
It was a small town. A lot of the same people were involved with both organizations and also held other pertinent positions in various organizations in town.
I initially continued to attend meetings at both organizations and made a sincere, good faith effort to support their work. I hoped to both improve the town I lived in and establish a freelance income doing website work and writing.
One of the board members for Aberdeen Revitalization Movement seemed to hate me on sight and shot down every suggestion I made. Their one and only employee, whose title was Executive Director, would quietly implement my ideas a few months later without calling attention to the fact that it was mine.
As long as I didn't get credit, Ms. Meanie Face seemed fine with my ideas being implemented. Inference: I actually had good ideas, good enough to steal them in spite of being an outsider in a small town, "rude, crude and socially unacceptable" and being actively socially gatekept out.
There were two problems with this:
1. I didn't get credit, so this was not helping me network, establish a positive reputation on the ground and thereby foster an adequate freelance income.
2. Every idea he stole he botched. Without getting with me to make sure he understood what I meant, he couldn't execute what I was trying to communicate based on whatever small blurb had gotten tossed out in a meeting and promptly shot down so I couldn't elaborate.
So it wasn't EVEN improving the town I lived in. It was allowing him to pretend to do the job while not really accomplishing anything and it was shafting me. And that's it.
Even after I stopped participating as a volunteer to try to protect myself from this abusive shit and began providing detailed information online concerning my ideas, he continued to use my ideas, not credit me and also still did it badly. More detailed instructions did not prevent him from botching the execution of my ideas.
Lessons learned:
1. In some sense, people cannot steal my ideas. What's in my mind cannot be adequately conveyed verbally or in writing for someone else to do exactly what I had in mind.
2. If I want something in particular to happen, I need to execute. Hoping I can just share good ideas and someone else can do the annoying work doesn't result in the thing I was envisioning.
3. People who steal ideas and refuse to credit the source and refuse to compensate the person trying to establish an income are not only unethical, they are incompetent. If they weren't, they would come up with and execute their OWN ideas.
The big problem with "stolen ideas" is that the originator of the idea gets shafted out of credit and either directly or indirectly out of financial compensation.
If you know someone is stealing business ideas instead of finding a legitimate source for ideas or a legitimate means to use those ideas, like licensing them for a fee, I will suggest you not work with them and not buy from them.
Even if you don't care about morality, their work will be second rate and if they will shaft someone else, rest assured they will do you dirty too. It's not in your best interest to trust them.
Business ethics matter because business requires trust. You are trusting them to actually do X for you when you pay them and also trusting them to not misuse your credit card information etc and these people cannot be trusted.