Contractor's Coffee Break: A Web of fame & infamy

The internet is a funny thing. You can spend months of your virtual life burbling (or Tweeting) away to no-one but yourself, cocooned in a black hole of awareness. Nothing impinges or is interested in you or your opinion or thoughts, and lack of apparent feedback can encourage you to forget that the internet is, by default, a public space.



Being watched in the Black Hole



Expressing opinions, thoughts and experiences in blogs and forums that you might only have written in a precious diary or whispered to friends appears to be increasingly common. And why not? You're not a internationally successful golf or football star, who'd be interested in you? Who indeed. Then fate and circumstances conspire to push you blinking into the internet spotlight and you suddenly realise that every off-colour joke, risque experience and half-baked opinion is being pored over by people you have never met and for reasons you cannot imagine.



So what do you put into a forum or a blog? Nothing that will get you arrested if you shout out the same thing at your local bus stop, that's what. While we can have outrageous opinions at the dinner table, would we so quickly threaten to 'break the legs' of someone in the street, as one forum user threatened in a (now-deleted) post? Anonymity on the web is an illusion; we furtively hope that someone will read our blog or forum post, and agree with our comment, or else why put it out there? I can't believe we're all piling onto social networking sites to disagree with each other. Even better about the somewhat anonymous, consuming World Wide Web, it seems, is the naysayer who you persuade into saying yes. But once a comment by you is uploaded or written online, it's there for all to see and no-one to remove (web archiving, anyone?), particularly if admin is on his coffee break too.



Recently, even CUK had a brush with fame. It had HM Revenue & Customs peruse it (and use it on one occasion) while defending a widely watched tax ruling. Separately, the CUK forum then had the BBC toddle over to it find out what the fuss was about for jobbing contractors, in search of an organic comment or two for its flagship afternoon and nightly news bulletins. We were agog - who among the congregation was going to show their face, stand up and be counted? Well nobody actually, it seems, as it wasn't one of us in the end who made it. Our fifteen minutes of fame (it was more like fifteen seconds actually) had come and gone, and so had our innocence. We now know that while fame is fleeting, people out there are reading us. And not always for the reasons we might hope.



I have been wrestling with this very issue of 'Web 3.0' since being invited by CUK to pen a monthly comment - do I sign under my real name and blow my (perceived) anonymity, or do I stay with the nom de plume of my CUK character? I have for the moment opted to maintain the illusion. Probably because a recent online reputation management seminar I attended didn't say anything about sockpuppets.



Infamy! Infamy! They've all…



There's been a bit of a seismic shift on the contracting landscape, and nobody's noticed more than the world's largest IT company - HP, owners of EDS. For the past six years there's been a court battle over promises made by EDS to secure a contract with BSkyB, which turned out not to be truthful On the 15th February the verdict was returned. The High Court judge found that EDS had deceitfully induced BSkyB into a contract for the supply of a new CRM system. HP has rejected that EDS acted deceitfully to BSkyB yet since then, the judge has ordered EDS to pay £200million interim damages. This is on a contract that was originally worth £54million. Still, if a liability four times the value of the original contract doesn't make you pause; maybe an UNCAPPED one will.



What has this got to do with us non-celebrity, one-person contractors? Within the last couple of days, the forum's seen debate on the usefulness of contractors paying for Professional Liability insurance (PLI). One contributor even suggested that PLI was a waste of time and that if a contract needed it, take it out, show it to the agent and then cancel the policy. My advice in this current climate? Buy insurance and keep it. Who do you think will be expected to cough up if the contract they're working on goes belly up in the future? You and me. Of course, if you don't have insurance that's where your savings and your home (not to mention potentially your marriage too) come into the picture. My other two pennies worth? Make sure that whatever you do in the marketplace that you under-promise and over-deliver. Hopefully that will keep you out of the courts in the first place, while getting you 'repeat' contracts.



But in the event that one of us small fry contractors does get dragged before a Mr or Mrs Justice, if the exposure doesn't kill us, then it might make us stronger. After all, contractors are a valuable echelon of the flexible working community who don't get enough attention, at least so our lobbyists tend to claim.



I experienced that other black hole us contractors fall in – that of the internet, only very recently. And as a victim, I can tell you that once it has you in its grasp, it becomes increasing difficult to get yourself free. A few weeks ago, and with the intention of not falling into oblivion for at least one night, I met up in the real, face-to-face, world with some CUK regulars. Yet in the supposedly sociable setting of a pub, I soon found myself posting to CUK's forum on my iPhone. Even worse, but better for me at the time, everybody else was doing the same. Look up: blush, sip beverage, quietly put iPhone away. Next? Plan toilet trip/lone cigarette break/emergency call outside to check thread for 'anonymous' replies.





COJAK