My Role in the Play

The old company, it turns out was another short con that went nowhere but did manage to amass two or three good sounding customers. The idea was simple: buy a simple technology, sell it to a couple of fortune 500 companies at a huge loss, claim to be a successful business with fantastic clients and sell the company -- My old friend and new boss, DC, actually came close until the prospective buyer asked to look at the books.

Ultimately, DC had been slowly pissing his coin of the realm into this toilet of a software company and was increasingly anxious to morph it into another short con.

Thing was: the old company actually had clients that needed to be kept happy in order to lend credibility to the new iteration.

My role was simple: keep the existing clients happy.

This was easy at the beginning. I tend to speak with authority and people tend to believe what I tell them. Whilst this might appear a fantastic asset on a caper such as this, there is a hitch: I am a terrible liar; so, I don't. People generally believe what I say because I tell the truth (funny how that works).

Q: How does a con artist work with a dupe like me?
A: Disinformation.

DC quickly realized that all he had to do is feed me lies and I would happily pass them as fact. This made me a great asset in investor meetings. That is, it did. Once my knowledge of the company grew beyond the disinformation I had been fed I became a liability. One fateful evening, as we were sitting down to begin the show, an investor asked me a simple question about the company. I answered the question simply and honestly. It never crossed my mind that I was not supposed to tell the truth and when the same question came up mid meeting DC answered with a bold faced lie.

I was not invited to another meeting.

My role had not really changed. I was still the "Accounts Manager" (a title that makes me cringe) responsible for liaising with clients.