Collateral Damage

What wicked circles we weave.

I was contacted by Cyanide Jester a few weeks ago to make some synth drugs for him.  I said sure, why not.  Synth isn't hard to make and I was full up on Standards and they were not moving.  So I ran the prices, figured out about how long it would take sent him some quotes, got the stuff and made the boosters.

They took a bit longer then expected.  My delivery took a few days to get to me.  I made them, had a very busy holiday, sent him an eve mail, he responded, and then I heard nothing.  I didn't think much of it. I had told him that I am rather informal about things.

While surfing some links, I stumbled upon his Blog.  Recognizing the name I read back a few posts and discovered that he had stolen from his corporation and biomassed the character.  I guess I won't get paid.  The easy part for me is that I was holding off on selling them because I was a nice person and have other places for it to go.  However, the tangled web of action and interaction is fantastic.  I am very amused to find myself as collateral damage in someone else's story.

It is a fun read.  I'll be flipping through the rest of his posts and I hope he keeps writing.  I've already shared it with my corp thieving friends and we giggled over it.

The lesson I have learned is that maybe I should do down payments or something?  I don't actually know.  I function on a 'don't buy what I can't afford' type of thing whenever I do a business deal.  Buying the supplies and making the boosters was not a one path oh well ISK down the drain situation for me.  There is still, maybe, a business lesson to be learned here.  

People that know me happily forward me money when I build things for them.  I don't ask for it because I always function within the realm of my own wallet.  Also, my relationship with my corp members has a lot of trust. If they ask me to build them a run of boosters I know that they are going to pay me for that run of boosters once it is finished.

I don't expect the same thing from strangers as I expect from my corp mates. Making a specialized product for someone is different than having it on hand as part of my regular production line.  While this situation is an amusing check mark in history it is a good forward warning to my future attempt at sales and focused production.