No Good turn goes unpunished

The poem 'IF' by Rudyard Kipling does inspire me, especially the conflicting dualism expressed in it. ' Your approbation or condemnation, those two impostors. Well neither feel like impostors most of the time. We seek approbation from our parents, our friends, our work colleagues, even our children.

Professional friends are another matter. How people can look other people in the eye, whilst pretending to be 'right on' never ceases to amaze me.

I was approached in the summer of 2006 by someone trying to sell me SEO services. For the uninitiated, that is the search engine optimisation art, the trying to get good placement in the search engines business.

I was slightly amused that they approached me, as up to a year before I was considered to be the best promotion 'expert' on the island, if not in the hemisphere. My placings across the board in the major search engines on phrases so diverse as to be ludicrous was my own downfall in a way. Anyone searching on any subject I covered, used my writings to plump out their own content, many just copying lock stock and barrel, up to 136 people per page at one time, thereby diluting the value of my content to less than non existent.

The other boob I had made was not keeping my eye on the ball whilst ill. I think I invented the linking system which so plagues the internet now, I used my network of sites and linked each to each other with such success that sites were copying my links and putting them on their own sites. When I realised that this would become a frowned on practice (just before the advent of link farms) I gave instructions for the links to be categorised and reviewed, but was ignored by those who thought they knew better - I was to weak to even look at a computer for some months, so when I made it back into the office, we no longer had a viable business, we had a liability - all my sites banned in Google. You couldn't even find windowoncyprus by looking up windowoncyprus!

Anyway back to the story. Ian arrived with his wife, Louisa. Never assume anything. I assumed that he, being a salesman, could drive. I didn't even ask, I assumed, this as I discovered makes an ass {of} u {&} me.

They talked the talk, and I, being a silly person at times, thought that we could help each other. I would give them 40% of my promotion and hosting business in return for some jolly hard work and total loyalty for a while, when that side of things was back where it was before (and I thought I knew how to achieve this) that was a pretty valuable piece of real estate and should make all their dreams come true.

Louisa had some pretty standard ideas of what worked with search engine placement, but I gave her her head, just in case she was right, she decided that sites such as cyprus-villas.com and cyprus-wedding.com were not up to the task and needed re designing.

See { http://web.archive.org/web/20060610043959/http://cyprus-villas.com/ } you will need to copy the whole url into your browser if you are interested enough to look ; and { http://web.archive.org/web/20060715024959/http://www.cyprus-wedding.com } to see the way they were before the fall of 2007. By April of 2007 they then looked like

{ http://web.archive.org/web/20061210103450/http://www.cyprus-wedding.com }
and
{ http://web.archive.org/web/20070408232910/http://www.cyprus-villas.com }

They had been running a website called seo-technology.com 'first alarm' should have rung when I discovered that they had fallen out with a German web designer in Larnaca, who had apparently stolen their site at seo-technology.co.uk, which Louisa had paid for using her credit card, but this chap had control of because of the hosting she was on with him.
The second alarm should have been the argument they were having with their landlords, the house they left without paying the rent, They moved into a newish semi on the outskirts of Larnaca, which I paid the deposit and rent on, this is when I discovered that he didn't drive and she was driving a rental car. The bills started coming in.... a ridiculously high electricity bill, the telephone, the school ... they wanted lifts, lifts to school, from school, he wanted lifts to go out selling advertising, everything he did seemed to need someone else to do a job first to facilitate him. Attention to detail was not her strong point. Not when doing anything for me anyway - I later discovered that great pains were taken when doing any work on their own sites but when working on ours, not at all - silly mistakes, time consuming things which mean ones time would be better spent just doing it oneself in the first place: links to the wrong pages, bad grammar, spelling mistakes (unnecessary in this time of spell check)

pools,, moving on to the town of Larnaca, the resorts in  Limassol , peaceful  locations like the west coast housing Polis, Latchi and the Akamas.. papahos, SEO Technology proving internet promotion from Cyprus. ! and on and on and on and on...

Oh the list goes on, but these are small things which I later discovered the reasons for.

I took out a loan at the bank for fifteen thousand pounds to finance this venture - they were working behind my back on their own sites, pretending they had no money whilst collecting money secretly from my customers. When I discovered some mild disloyalty and called them on it, they left in the middle of the night, taking things which did not belong to them, leaving the house I was responsible for in an unbelievable state (it took 4 of us 2 days to begin to clear of rubbish and mess) and leaving unpaid bills and a trail of devastation.

Louisa McIntosh - Lister

Louisa and Ian McIntosh - beware of these people - McIntosh Communications and Seo technology are the names they trade under, they have no connection with Armata although they are apparently pretending that they do. They are still trying to collect money from people here. When I have time I shall elucidate further, but for now I need to put back together the complete mess I have been left with for doing people a favour- yet again.

As a small aside, I had let 2 lots of people use a small flat I had in town recently. It saved them a few bob on a hotel for the night and I have always been of the mind that if someone lends you something that you return it in the same or better condition than it was when you took it.

Not the thing nowadays it seems. I was storing a white suite of furniture their for my mother prior to selling it for her, it had white covers on it. I arrived on the afternoon they were departing to find that they had taken the covers off the largest sofa. I went back a few weeks later to find they had let their 5 year old draw in ballpoint pen on all the arms of the sofas, the footstool they had used to house the ashtray had burn marks on the upholstery, they left their rubbish and they also left rotting food in the fridge on a plate!

What is it with people?