I've formed fairly amicable, and beyond, relationships with some of the folks that have contacted me through this web site. There's semi-regular contact and often, these start out like this...
One will ask if CW is still available.
I answer yes.
They then with almost perfect certainty opine that they can't believe a boat like that is still available.
The conversation then typicall shifts to things more interesting and unpredictable.
Most of this small group knows the boat well, either thru in-person visits or multiple 10's of hours of pouring over the web site (the site is "instrumented" and rats visitors out just like every other site) and asking questions/discussing it with me. I take it as a compliment when someone who knows CW and boats in general say they say they "can't believe it" because they know the caliber of care it enjoyed from the detailed information on the site and our conversations "about boats".
At times, I take the "can't believe..." as a polite invitation to share my thoughts on why. I may half-heartedly mumble something about the multiple very severely unappreciated collapses of the "technology" I foolishly relied upon when I built this site.. and covid didn't help either.. but it's often an incomplete sentence at best (I bitch in my blogs, not with friends) as I am usually looking forward to the more positive discussion. My consulting/job/company/study is all about finding who made some fatal decision out of millions or more in order to (hopefully) interrupt harm to a design and it's subsequent users... I honestly don't enjoy the blame part. Except when it's someone with a severely uncalibrated confidence-to-hours (training x practice) ratio. Or merely just lazy when they're supposed to be making decisions like a professional (i.e. standards and conscientiousness). Pardon my digression.
But, here I sit with a few emails and texts checking in and it's my turn to respond, so it's likely to come up. So, I thought I'd try to put down something slightly more complete... this entry lets me just paste the link in and quickly advance to the more interesting discussion. So, on to the blame....
The one word answer as to why Clock Work remains squarely in my possession is really simple...... me.
THE leading category deserving blame for a bunch of genuine/worthy interested parties slipping thru the cracks is me mostly ignoring them for far too long or in about three cases not knowing for months they were trying. Not a new thing either.. when I first began my company, I discovered quickly that I do not have the temperament or patience to enjoy selling. Which is why I tried multiple times to hire a broker who would do what he said he'd do... pausing here to let my gasping laughter subside.. and resume normal breathing......... Ok, back. Hey.. offer's still on the table. If anyone wants to actually SEE the evidence of the chasm between what some brokers say and what they actually do, in their own words, just come on by the boat some time.
To bore in a bit deeper into how I've failed CW, let's look at the two ways I earned this blame.
Third priority is not an *actual* priority - For the entire time CW has been available, dealing with it has been at most my third priority. There's zero life/death urgency to me to sell, while the other things matter much more to me (but knowing how "thinking" happens in some, I will here provide an Emergency Response to those so-wired.. see Note 1). And most of the time, my dance card is pretty full. If something important needs doing on the other two, and it does with disgusting frequency, that gets the bandwidth... the term is "executive control". Third priority has been noted numerous times in the blogs from the start. Actually... scroll down the blog list, it's right there in the first sentence of one of the first.
One-at-a-time engagement - While there is no alternative to the prior point because of the nature of operating with priorities, this one is not something to brag about. In a nutshell, this means if one interested party seems very sincerely engaged and serious, I just work that one instead of doing them in parallel. A single sincerely interested party WILL eat all the time I have for Clock Work and more.
With that, allow me to acknowledge the star attraction from my day job.... technical decision making under opaque, frequently very low-probability/very high risk.. chance... randomness.. all the unknown/unknowable random things that can substantially contribute to both success and failure, but the pathological cases are what consume the bulk of my attention (first, make safe [consequential] decisions.. i.e. primum non nocere). It's all about the stuff you can't put into your model/plan because there's no way to predict it or even know of its existence. Don't worry... it's still inescapably 100% my fault, but permit me to add..... like..... *F* technology as it is practiced now almost exclusively by hacks who are merely "good at math". Failures in the 1. website tech and 2. pointless/frequent often-concealed alteration of the pretend-reliable email tech that connects this site and interested parties to me had their own body counts. That email provider GOES TO WAR when you master all the little PITAs to conceal your identity/activity. This spring, important parts of the site (i.e. beyond the email link) just stopped working ON ITS OWN.. untouched... for 1-2 months... meaning 1-2 months of interested parties could not connect... and then once discovered, a week of my heartbeats to fix it. And then.. back to try and catch up on (actual) priorities one and two.. zero useful work on P3 for >2+ months. There were likely other interested contacts.. I have no way to know what business was lost due to the site being down, but when the email problems of last year and this got sorted, I estimate at least 6 rock solid buyers just got impatient with me not returning their messages and bought other things. Man on the fricking moon in 1969 but modern web sites just "vibrate loose". [Good place to put this too... tech just crapping out and inconvenient times.. is EXACTLY why I burned 18 months looking for a pure mechanical boat.] [adding this early 8/23 - just discovered yet another swath of functionality that has stopped working.. seems limited to mobile visitors... use a laptop. Not worth it to me to track such things down anymore when they'll just break something else)
Taking all of the above into consideration... my time limits and a rational nontrivial expectation of future technology failures are why I added purchase option 2. To get me out of the loop as much as possible and to put an insanely attractive price on the boat.
Emergency reply/Note 1 - For those whose INSTANT high-certainty diagnosis of: other things matter more to me is.... "not for good reason but to conceal a slacker's lack of care", please take your low-hours incompressible ignorance and lack of experience at being.. you know.. actually useful solving more than de minimis problems and drop dead. Maximizing the service lives and readiness of my (mostly well-selected) possessions is 50% of the joy I get from them, including those things not in daily service, like CW. Any good/passionate designer of things/ideas to solve problems is ridiculously/unconventionally enthralled by such crap, which bores the masses (who ironically benefit from that). I put Clock Work away right with the full knowledge I might own her for a long time.