Okay, I usually am not a big fan of blogging about the “OMG Google yourself and see what you find” memes. But this one is really fun. This was passed on to me by a hosting customer of mine, but I haven’t seen it make its way around the /. journal circle yet, so here we go.

The meme: Google the phrase “(Your name) looks like” and find the best one from the first page of results. Don’t forget to put it in quotes; otherwise it won’t work.

I went for it, Googled “Erica looks like” and got a hilarious page of results, but by far my favorite one was Erica Looks Like A Lion. (Yes! Click it! It’s a Flickr photo!) Now I do not know this Erica, but I can appreciate the inherent lioness in this Erica, as I feel I too have an inherent lioness. 😀

My other favorite link, since we’re sharing, is Would the real Erica please stand up?, which is a blog entry about the trials and tribulations of being an Erica Vonderheid and meeting another Erica Vonderheid. I totally get what this Erica is saying, too, because I know if I met another Erica Douglass, well, that would just be freaky.

What can you guys find when you Google this phrase? Post away! I hope to see this make the /. journal rounds. 😉

Russ wanted a “Simpli phone”, so I picked up a Sprint Treo 650 on craigslist yesterday ($275 including a 128MB memory card; slightly used) and began the long hassle of negotiating my cell phone plan with Sprint PCS.

Rep: “Thank you for calling Sprint PCS. How may I help you?”
Me: “I’d like to add a second phone line to my account.”
Rep: [launches into long reading of how great Sprint’s new Fair & Flexible plans are]
Me: [cuts him off] “I’m not interested in signing anything more than a 1-year agreement.” [Fair & Flexible plans require a 2-year agreement.]
Rep: [sounding disappointed] “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yes. What are your prices for 1000 minutes per month?” [quickly hits up Sprint PCS website to see retail prices]
Rep: “We currently offer 1100 minutes for $65.99 a month.”
Me: [notes that this is the same price as shown on the Sprint PCS website] “Now listen here. I’ve been a customer of Sprint PCS for 7 years, and I pay my bill on time every month. I think you can do a little bit better than that.”
Rep: [without missing a beat] “Of course. We have a special plan [snarky Erica note: “special” is defined here as “for the really pushy customers”] of 1000 minutes for $50/month.”
Me: “Great! I’ll take that, then. And it only requires a 1-year agreement?”
Rep: “Yes.”

This phone conversation took 40 minutes.

Morals of the story: 1) Cell phone companies suck. 2) Always negotiate, especially with big companies. You have more power than you think.

I wrote a blog a few days ago about how guys are in relationships/fuck-buddy-ships/whatever for one reason. And, while that generally may be true, it’s not always true. So, as a matter of swinging things the other direction a bit, I want to write about someone I love very deeply. That someone is S.

S and I first met in person in November, when I came to NYC and ended up staying at his place in Manhattan. There, we realized we have a lot in common. I first noticed it when I stepped off the plane to find him waiting for me and reading a book on quantum physics. It was then that I knew we would get along really well. We were shocked to find we had even more in common, from general attitudes toward life to personality tests (Myers-Briggs INTJ; Enneagram type 3) to jobs (S managed a datacenter for a big NYC Forex firm; I run a hosting company. The jobs are shockingly similar) to having been burned in relationships in the past and the consistent struggle to find someone who gets past the tough outer shell and into our hearts. S is a Pisces and I am a Cancer, which also makes us a natural fit, and also makes him best friend #4 of mine who is a Pisces.

The unfortunate thing is that S and I can’t be in a relationship because we drive each other crazy. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but the fact is that when you’re 99% the same as someone, the 1% of the time when you are completely different is so annoying as to be fatally damaging to any relationship that would try to develop. So that’s a bummer. But the good news is we realized that really quickly and were able to adjust to being best friends and having conversations that go something along the lines of “Can you fucking believe that <event> happened?” “No way! Well, here’s what you should do. …” “I TOTALLY AGREE!” And this goes on multiple times a day. The really good news is I’ve hired S temporarily to help get a bunch of stuff going on at Simpli, so all of our customers will have some cool new toys to play with this summer. And, before he moves out here on May 5, I just wanted to say, S, I couldn’t get through a day without you there to bounce ideas off of and tell me about all those cool websites you find (except UserFriendly. I could do without more UserFriendly links!) 😉 And, above all, I am glad that you are one of my best friends, and I will definitely support you in whatever you decide to do with your life. I love you with all my heart. Welcome to California!

I’ve made an effort to meet more women lately, and I’ve definitely succeeded. One thing I can definitely appreciate is the need for more women-oriented conferences and breakout sessions. Too often, women are discouraged from becoming techies because they don’t think they have as many skills as the guys — when, in reality, it’s often that men tend to boast and brag and women are socialized to be more modest about their achievements.

I’m in support of events like the Women 2.0 conference because it is important for women, especially younger women, to meet and get to know women who have become successful. If you are a woman entrepreneur or woman techie in the Bay Area, I encourage you to attend. If you know of a woman who would benefit from being a part of this, please forward this blog entry or their website on to her.

Thanks!

I was digging through my Documents folder today, and I found the following essay that I had written in college for my Business 10 class. I’m going to reprint it word for word, minus company names, here. It is dated September 21, 1999. I was 18 years old when I wrote it.

—–

Career Plan
Erica Douglass

What do the next ten years hold in store for me?

To go into my future hopes requires knowing a little more about me, as well as my past. I am very much an entrepreneur, and “creative” has been the major word that teachers and friends alike use to describe me. I am currently running my fourth company, ShakaDesign.com. I have made enough money with these companies and Internet jobs to live on my own.

Right now I work at [a small startup company] as their web marketer. Basically, my boss hired me to redo their website, which is currently three years old and aging fast. Like an person getting old, some things have slowly started to bend or break with the website. To “rejuvenate” it, we plan to switch web hosting companies as well as give the site a badly-needed makeover.

That is where I come in. I do all of their “web stuff.” Anything directly or indirectly related to the Internet goes through me. I work 20 hours a week, get a free work laptop, and eat a lot of pizza sitting in front of my computer. It’s a great job.

I also get paid $20 an hour to do that, with a raise to $25 next month. I’m very pleased.

I am always coming up with ideas, and my father has suggested to me from a very young age that if I go to Silicon Valley and capitalize on these ideas, I could become very successful. He has implanted these concepts so much into me that I constantly write down new ideas I have.

My dream is to own my own Internet company… but it seems that now every teenager who is even slightly computer-savvy is a “web designer” and wants to be the next Jeff Bezos. However, I’m a little different in two ways. For one, I’m female. Two, I don’t want to be like Jeff Bezos because Amazon.com is not profitable! I want to be famous like Jeff Bezos, but I won’t envy his entrepreneurial skills until he can prove that his company can turn a reasonable profit by doing business solely on the Web.

I don’t want to sell books or over-the-counter drugs. I want to radically change the way people use computers and the Internet. I want to change the business model for the Internet instead of making “just another portal” or a bookstore. I want to help make it easier for the world to come online, and I don’t think WebTV is the answer. I honestly don’t think the answer has been invented yet, but that is what I’m here to do.

I’m also going to write a book someday. I don’t know what it is going to be about, but I will write it and it will be good.

I may sound cocky. Honestly, though, if at the age of 16 I had decided that I wasn’t a good web designer, I might have not emailed ten local design companies with a resume and some graphics work I had done. I might have also not gotten hired for my first real Internet job, a summer internship at a Cincinnati, Ohio web design company called [name removed]. (I lived in Indiana until recently.) I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had decided that this whole Internet thing was just too hard and that I was going to go back, sit down, and watch cartoons. And I won’t be the owner of an Internet company in ten years if I start slacking off and not learning new technologies and exploring new options now.

In the end, it all comes down to this statistic which has been at the front of my mind recently: 60% of the people in this world don’t have a telephone. Yes! It’s true! So how do we expect them to get on the Net?

I’m Erica Douglass, entrepreneur, and I’m going to help solve that mystery.