I wanted to talk for a bit about some drama that's been going on behind the scenes and about some accusations that have been leveled against me.
It was in the middle of the covid shutdown when Oklahoma Cannabis Chronicles was remade into a website. Prior to me building it on WordPress, it was an ad hoc mix of technologies as the owner struggled to build her vision while lacking the skills to do so. I was bored because we were in the middle of the covid shut down, so I offered to help this individual.
After sitting down and hearing the requirements, I felt that a WordPress site would meet the criteria nicely, and after a couple of months, I had one built and the Oklahoma Cannabis Chronicles website came to be.
I had some difficulties with the format, however. It didn't take me long to figure out that I was looking at at least a couple of 14-hour days or work a month in order to keep a "magazine" format, despite the fact that we had moved onto a blogging platform that would allow me to add content whenever it turned up in the inbox.
In addition to this difficulty, I really felt like the site was trying to do too much. It was a hefty load, taking as long as 30 seconds on mobile. In today's world, people don't wait around that long for a page to load. I asked several times to trim that front page down and rebuilt it in several ways but overall, the site was a good first effort, but it was not all that I had hoped that it could be.
Additionally, at no point, did said person ever help with anything on that site. I did all of the graphic design, all of the web design, all of the editing, and some of the writing. At the time, I was taking blog posts from other people, so I didn't have to do all of the writing but I still had to do some, and most of the stuff submitted to me had to be heavily edited. Occasionally, she might offer to help but she never actually did any of the things that I mentioned would help me out.
Now, I am the kind of person that doesn't mind helping a person out with something. On some days, it even helps me keep my mind right. But when helping somebody means doing it all for them, after a while I am going to pull back from the project.
Meanwhile, my boss was having her own sets of issues with said person as an employee. I was hired on behind the counter as a budtender. My boss had previously used me in the past to do compliance paperwork and inventory stuff. The trouble is that this person, as the manager, should have been doing this job all along and was not. And my boss's every attempt to rectify that was met with resentment and hostility.
My first month on this job was incredibly stressful because this person had me believing my boss was some terrible person and I really, really needed the money. So I showed up just totally stressed out every day.
One day, I had to call in because I had some teeth abscessing. The picture to this left is me on the next day.
This person called me the evening before this picture was taken and asked me what she should do because she wasn't happy at her job. I told her that I thought that she should do whatever she thought would make her happy. It's pretty standard advice coming from me, and also pretty infallible if you really think about it. Nobody ever accuses you of giving them bad advice if they somehow manage to find a bit of happiness in this world.
The next day, this individual quit, while knowing how bad a shape I was in. The picture above is what I looked like when I came to work. So to make a long story short, she quit with no notice and at the worst possible time, because my boss's daughter's 18th birthday was on this day, and I was down for the count physically.
Now, in the world I come from, people that call you friend and then do you this way are not really your friends. So I pulled way back from that magazine. She blocked me on all of her social media accounts and then proceeded to tell her side of the story behind my back and where I had no possibility of defending myself. So, this post is an attempt to set the record straight.
Eventually, I ended up building The Stashbox web page. It is a very nice site and I am proud of the work that I did on it but it also costs me around a grand a year to keep running. Right now, I just don't have that kind of money. In fact, money being tight was what led me to building this site on Wix. It is worth mentioning that so far I have not spent any money on it and while it is pretty stripped down compared to previous incarnations, I have not had to touch a single line of code yet. It's all drag-and-drop web building. This site, as it stands was built in a single day. It is capable of blogging, managing events, posting to social media, and more pretty much right out of the box.
Since that day she has reported my social media accounts on several different occasions and had me put in jail. She has talked crap and run me down behind my back and done the same to my boss and her shop. She has even sent her current boss to threaten me physically recently. I may be a nice guy but people that come at me this way end up bounced.
It has been a year since she quit us and she still holds a grudge. I know that it is a thing in this industry for people to run down the employers but what she has done borders on harassment. She refuses to let this issue drop, so I am here to set the record straight. I am not the kind of person to tell stories or carry on drama but I have had enough from this individual.
Just be aware that not all of the things that you may hear about me or my boss are true. And if you think about employing this individual in the cannabis industry, I implore you to consider deeply what you're about to get yourself into. And if you're in the cannabis industry and need a website built and don't mind spending a little money, hit me up! And honestly, I just want to put this whole mess behind me. I do not deserve any of the crap that was slung my way, especially when you consider that I was just trying to help this person out.
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