Blog: The Story Of The Peskiest Thing Ever Sold By Clarity
An informal rambling tale for amusement of the Curious - for legal safety, let me hereby disclaim everything that's written here as being complete and utter fiction since I do in fact mention some companies by name and I can't back up some of the stuff with paperwork, information having been verbal at times. So, with that, here is a work of fiction, based INCREDIBLY CLOSELY on reality.

Back in early 2002, Clarity was responsible for sourcing and making BT's ADSL adaptor available outside of the cosy confines of BT Engineers' vans for the good old General Public to buy. Ohhh Yes, had it not been for Clarity, you lot would all still have nothing but dangly horrors flailing around every phone socket in the house - unless you paid a BT Guy to come and install your ADSL.

While many people need nothing more complex than the simple plug-in ADSL extension cable that your helpful BT Line Engineer uses when he carries out a "paid for" ADSL installation, some of us are quite picky about things being plugged in which could be firmly hardwired, and kept out of sight.

One obvious reason for prefering to hardwire your ADSL extension rather than have it plugged in is to avoid any chance of UN-plugging by Stupid People. More often though, the reason for full and concealed hardwiring is one which also necessitates an all-in-one filter adaptor on your master wall box in the first place, rather than have those "stupid little things" hanging from all your telephone sockets - namely "The Wife."

Anyway, to be getting along with this ramble, there was a rather glaring omission in the design of the adaptor unit that meant professionals, perfectionists, and geeky types couldn't excercise their installation skills to the max. We found that LOTS of people would rather use a fully hardwired version of BT's ADSL adaptor for one reason or other, and so we brought about providing a solution.

Since there was insufficient finanical or industry weight within our humble halls to persuade (read "buy" compliance from) the BT unit's manufacturer, that it would be a Good Thing to make a version of the product which presented both telephone and ADSL IDC terminals on the back of the adaptor, we had to resort to making the bloody things ourselves. Oh and it's worth mentioning the one existing alternative company who just would NOT listen either; Seriously, I swear to you here and now, well before they even produced their copy version, their man was sat in my office and I illustrated the need for a separate ADSL source on the arse of it. They COULD have made a small change to the design before going to production, but I guess they knew better, eh? Arseholes more like.

SO... By a little dance of disassembling, drilling, mounting, soldering, and reassembling the original BT unit, we modified them to feature not a 3-terminal IDC block, but a 5-terminal screw block. This was Modified Adaptor Version 1, on the right there.

This served us for a time, and many a person was helped out and was Most Delighted.



Now, IDC terminals are commonly used on telephone gear in preference to screw terminals for a couple of reasons. They're fast, they're secure, and they don't need the extremely fiddly telephone wire stripped. So when the BT design was revised very slightly to use a different bridging PCB that allowed us to mount a second 3-way Krone block instead, we changed our design on the modified version to the guy on the right here, Version 2.

This solved another problem too - the screw terminal version required that we fit a completely new PCB. The cost of this was ridiculously prohibitive, and the process VERY time consuming. This version allowed us to use the factory supplied PCB, but sadly was just as, if not more, time consuming to prepare.


At that point it wasn't really benefitting us much beyond P.R. to make these. It was helping people out who had need of the extra terminals, but it WAS taking up a sore amount of physical time. It became impossible to keep churning them out and still carry out the usual day jobs so a lot of unpaid overtime was put in. Even so it wasn't too great an output volume and orders became late, people became annoyed, and since People Talk To Each Other, we got the arse ripped out of our painstakingly built reputation once or twice, all thanks to this one nasty item. Don't start me on that though, I'll be here all frickin night.

"Take them off sale" you would have said. I tried that. But the mailbox just filled up with people who wanted it. Wih renewed vigour I commanded them put back on the site, convinced we could make enough in decent time. Trust me on this, it was a very difficult situation to figure out the best course of action. You really had to be there at the time. OK, I guess I fucked it all up at the end of the day. Can't turn the clock back, but I've learned from it at least.


Now, back to the substance of this book;
We first sat down and made coffee for the company who makes the BT field engineer's version, and showed them our modified version as far back as - and I shit you not here - April 2002! But they just weren't very interested. Believe it or not, they just weren't able to see why anyone might want such a change to the design, what would be the point?

They would certainly have been interested if we could throw a very large chunk of cash into it of course, and basically pay for the whole thing up front. But we were small, and we... *I* had no such floating cash as is needed to hook the obedience, loyalty and commitment of a volume manufacturer.

So every few months I'd speak to my associate at that company, chat about business, and inevitably we'd mention the modified variant of the ADSL adaptor. Finally, as Summer 2003 drew to a close, there was a decisive event which pricked up their ears and effectively sealed their interest in creating the requested variant. Fujitsu's corporate installations division had landed a contract to kit out the Post Office's plethora of national locations with ADSL installations, and were doing the rounds of a number of potential hardware suppliers to define and source the necessary equipment for the job's specifications. After some lengthy negotiations, chats, scmoozes and sample equipment provisions for evaluation and trial installations for the PO, (including of course the custom modified version - after all, that would make an excellent leverage point if they wanted that in vast quantities wouldn't it...) they finally settled with us.

It strikes me as amazing that their buyers were so lame as to not have tracked down the actual manufacturing plant by themselves, but the best words to describe that situation then are "A Business Opportunity". Interestingly they did try some other "middle men" in their search, but settled on Clarity out of the lot, which I can only put down to my own skill and personality as a corporate negotiator, or something. Yeh, that must be it.

Anyway, once we had commitment to go ahead, the Strokey Beard Decision was made to directly involved the manufacturer in the arrangements, and have them handle it direct for us having agreed a contract and pay-off - much to their delight and satisfaction of course. The right choice at the time, knowing one's own limitations in any given circumstances being a brave and commendable thing.

Apart from much more financial simplicity, it was supposed to have eased things along with extra speed and efficiency - after all, I criticise multi-tiered corporate shite so often myself I wasn't really keen on becoming some. So with the strength of closing the deal on the hardware (for a potential 10,000+ site installations mind!) in the picture now, the ball finally started rolling on a suculent corporate deal and manufacture of our custom ADSL adaptors. Naturally the Post Office/Fujitsu job would use them instead of the old version since they'd agreed that our hand-modified version was more useful to the job than the original design, so a guaranteed 10,000+ units were needed ASAP.


In October 2003 a completed sample (but still a prototype) landed on my desk, complete with the neat 6-way mini-IDC terminal block you see on this page. Perfect!

After I changed my undercrackers I had another Chat and derived that we should expect to see the production of the 6-way IDC unit some time in early November 2003, and boxes of the finished items in our grasp to sell to our clamouring public in late November.

No cigar, however.


November becomes December, the fat guy in the red suit does his annual Thing, and now we get a new Story. It emerges that the new unit is delayed due to BT contractual negotiations. You know, so that the change to the PCB could still be given "BT Approved" status, which Fujitsu needed as part of the remit.

This also makes a bit of sense of course, because after all, BT holds the rights to the original unit. Their permission and approval must be sought to officially manufacture a variant of it. The good thing about that though is that it could actually remain a BT branded product, complete with little BT leaflet! Sweet.

Now, you're familiar with the phrase "Couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery?"

The Fujitsu deal fell through, and the Post Office is getting the work done by BT direct instead. If you're sitting comfortably I'll tell you why;

Fujitsu's people in the first instance failed to conduct site visits at the outset to establish the content of the actual jobs in question. Imagine somebody at Fujitsu's surprise when some of the trial-installs couldn't be completed because the BT masters weren't NTE5 type. Seriously folks, can it really be that some joker takes home a salary every year for planning large scale corporate installations and maintenance projects and yet seems to have no concept of this totally basic possibility?

It gets worse. This is not an End Of The Road situation at this point. There's at least one little-known way that they could have gone ahead and had any and all the of those non-NTE5 type masters updated to NTE5 form, by legit BT engineers, for this corporate client. But again it seems that these bits of insider trade knowledge eluded our international-scale professionals, and quite understandably the P.O. backed out and went with BT direct instead. Well, they won't be using the funky new type of adaptor, but they WILL get the job done quickly, and properly.

Don't forget that the manufacturer of the ADSL adaptors was supposed to be advising them as well, but it seems not where being clever with the arrangements and BT procedures to save your deal is concerned.

How do you suppose I know about this kind of stuff? A very good BT engineer friend of mine, who happens to be good enough and thorough enough at his job that he learns about these useful little bytes of information.

Pot Of Gold, End Of The Rainbow, Cruelly Snatched Away. That's what I get for trusting "the professionals" to handle things properly, eh?

ANYWAY, this brings us up to date. Finally the new PCB-fitted adaptors have arrived, and my life is of improved quality as I write.

Oh, as a footnote - back in April 2002, when they sat and drank our coffee and ate our biscuits, we requested they look into a secondary ADSL wallbox with an integrated microfilter using the proven quality filtering used in the BT Adaptor. Finally we might be getting somewhere with that too, two years later. Until I have one in my mitt, I regard it with the pinch of salt with which I've come to treat this whole thing. We'll see if we finally get our wish list fulfilled at last. Just let it be known that this was campaigned for THAT long ago.

UPDATED: Well well, what do you know, a secondary box is almost ready...

So there you all have it. Almost two years down the line since a guy asked a manufacturer "could you do THIS for us", the item is being made. It certainly only took so long because there was no money to throw at the project to "encourage" compliance and effort from a manufacturer. This is how corporate business works then eh?

In closing this hopefully entertaining ramble, I'd like to just say; This whole story is proof, if any were ever needed, that;

Money DOES grow on trees...

But you're still fucked if you don't
HAVE a Money Tree. And a ladder.

JD

john at clarity dot it - if you have any comments, feel free to regail me.