I got out of the house, today, and enjoyed the weather by visiting my old haunts, the soft underbellies of Burlington, Greensboro, and High Point, where small manufacturers needed custom software, back in the day.

I left business cards with CPA firms, with whom I used to work. Otherwise, only UPS is advertising that they are hiring.

Most businesses are locked down, lest they be mobbed with the unemployed, desperate to document their job search on NC Works.

I successfully applied and tested for a job at Home Depot. UPS and Lowe’s not so much.

One day, I’ll have an opportunity to explain to a CPA that I have a secure software solution, not available on the internet.

A couple of weeks getting accustomed to custom software, and I may as well be selling drugs.

From what I saw, today, my money is on Burlington. The I-85 corridor toward Mebane offers more good hunting.

I was a dBase guy, which meant becoming a FoxBase guy and then a Microsoft Visual FoxPro guy.

And then we got moved to .NET. I even migrated the rating app front end for Carolina Farmer’s Mutual to .NET, before I was ceremoniously fired after seventeen years for telling the guy who ran the place exactly what I thought of him.

Since I quit my eight years running a website in the back of the Wife’s dress store on Halloween, after headbutting the morning manager at the restaurant next door, who had called me a faggot and consequently socked me smartly upside the head, I’ve dusted off my copy of VFP and rendered a piece of software featuring all the old bells and whistles.

After twelve years of being poisoned with eBay and Shopify, I’m back in the world of brick and mortar apps which are bespoke and do not rely upon the internet. It isn’t that the internet will go down – but that it will become unsafe – especially for anyone trying to do anything proprietary.

I really want Mike Rowe to revive a perfectly wonderful Windows-based programmable multi-user database.

On Baker Road in High Point, there is a trucking company which uses dBaseIII+ software written and maintained by Russians. I called on them twenty years ago, and then again, recently. We were in the convertible. Blew the Wife’s mind.

Among the exquisitely beautiful relationships I have enjoyed is with a Liberty CPA named Robert Ward, who directly my development of The Chair Co.’s GL, AP, AR, PR and Inventory software, as we did $10M per year, building 2500 glider rockers and ottomans per week, prior to NAFTA in 1994. By 2000, it was gone.

The owner, Tom Ferguson, was a cost accountant who grew to be a force in the industry, while gleefully giving me one highly defined task after another. Inscrutably, he sold out to his reps in 1996 and ended up getting most of his millions.

Of course, the reps mortgaged their homes and chose a HP furniture magazine editor to run the place. He took one look at me and started a contract with the software guys on I-85, near the airport.

I seem to remember coming back from a cruise with the Wife in March, to find all the hardware and software I used to keep 10 PCs and several printers running all day, in the attic.

I came back a few times, to fix problems associated with Y2K, but the new guys said it would take a year and $100k to replicate our Bill of Materials in the Inventory, to calculate product cost.

That was a fantastic crash and burn. I won’t bore you with my seventeen year empire among NC County Mutual insurance companies, but it was spectacular.