Last Wednesday, my eighteen year career at Diamond Comic Distributors drew to a close, all part of the ongoing clusterfuckery that is the Diamond bankruptcy.
But my Diamond career almost didn’t reach five years.
The tale was semi-legendary within Diamond Towers. It would be spoken of in hushed whispers, that someone did this, and who did it wasn’t known. Sometimes, someone would come to me, thinking I might know and be able to tell them it wasn’t true — “This couldn’t possibly have happened!” Yet, when asked directly I would gladly and completely own it. “I did this.” Eyes would grow wide. Someone might mutter, “You goddamn crazy son of a bitch.”
It’s that kind of tale.
It’s the tale of the day I pwned Bleeding Cool.
On January 4, 2012, Bleeding Cool, a comic book website that is part news, part gossip mongering, part muckraking, ran an article. They had a scoop. Huge, industry-shaking news.
For the first time in almost a decade, DC Comics and Marvel Comics were teaming up on an intercompany crossover featuring Batman and Spider-Man. According to Bleeding Cool’s report, the twelve issue series “Spider-Man/Batman will chronicle the many meeting of the pair through their respective careers as superhero crime fighters. The first issue, 48 pages long, will show the very first meeting between Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne, and the rest of the series will show the rest of the characters lives where they intersect.”
It was all bullshit. There was no such project.
Everything in their report? That all was my doing.
And to explain the hows and whys of that, I need to first go through three years of Diamond history.
I called myself “the PREVIEWS writer” because that — writing the product copy for PREVIEWS, the monthly catalog of comics and toys Diamond produced for thirty-seven years, up until a few weeks ago — was my main job duty. I had others — writing product articles for Dialogue, our glossy, retailer-focused magazine, and Daily, our retailer website — and in January 2009 I picked up yet another, handling our monthly sales charts. That involved taking raw spreadsheets from Order Processing, reviewing them and cleaning them up, writing a press release, and creating category articles (like this one) in Diamond’s internal CMS, News-Manager. This wasn’t anything I was hired or trained for, but 1) I was solid with Excel (and in the land of the blind, like Diamond, the one-eyed man is king), 2) we’d laid off Matt Matarozza (thanks, Great Recession) who had handled the sales charts, 3) Matt left behind neither instructions nor examples of his working files, and 4) by this time I had established a pretty solid reputation for myself in the Marketing Department as “the problem project person,” ie., someone who could take a messy project and make it make sense. (In the screenshot above, you can see I have a folder open called MBG, which stands for “Master Buyer’s Guide,” an Alliance Games project. It was the Ur-Problem Project. The instructions I eventually wrote ran something like 72 steps. It was not a simple, nor a kind, project.) This is why Diamond paid me the little bucks. (I was still making less than 30k at this point in my career.)
The first month I did the sales charts, I was feeling my way and I had to figure things out. My working files aren’t exactly there yet. Second month, I had it down. I had a system and I had a structure, and yeah, there was a lot of manual Excel elbow grease involved, but a sales chart file I worked on in March 2009 matches a sales chart file I worked on in March 2021. Over the years I thought about going back and making that first month’s files match. It wouldn’t have mattered, it would have just been for myself, and I never did.
The work I did on the sales charts was not-infrequently inconveniently timed for my main work — writing PREVIEWS and editing the monthly order forms. Reviewing the spreadsheets from Order Processing could take two hours… or six. One of the things I did with the charts, and it was only partly automated on the Order Processing side, was combining variant covers — and books could have two… or twenty-two — into a single quantity, so if X-Men #47 had fifteen different covers, it wasn’t penalized in the sales rankings by being scattered in the chart in fifteen different places. I know Dan Manser, the Director of Marketing, thought I would be able to use Excel’s VBA to somehow automate that review, but the titling data in the OP spreadsheets wasn’t sufficiently or consistently structured in a way that I could attack the variants with VBA.
Then, after I reviewed spreadsheets for Comics, Graphic Novels, Books, Magazines, Apparel, Toys, Collectibles, Games, and Manga, my draft spreadsheets would get an internal review before I sent them to Bob Wayne at DC Comics and David Gabriel at Marvel Comics (separately) for their feedback. Sometimes they would be fine. Sometimes they would question. Sometimes they would argue stridently. For the record, they were standing up for their companies and their business. They were arguing their corner. Yeah, both Bob and David could be strident at times — when I finally met Bob Wayne, several years after he left DC, he said, “I must not have been as horrible as I thought. I can’t believe you even want to talk to me!” — and I probably irritated them as much as they irritated me at times, but I respected them, I understood where they were coming from, I had their backs more times than they probably imagined I did, and I never held their stridency against them. They were standing up for their companies against the hated rival. I got it. I’m a comics fan. I know the history of the rivalry between Marvel and DC. I totally understood.
Then, once Bob and David had signed off on the numbers, I had to write a press release and get it approved internally, not to mention make a two-page spread for PREVIEWS before it went to press.
And while all of this was going on, I was also writing editorial copy for PREVIEWS, reviewing catalog sections, and proofing order form data before assigning the month’s item codes and making the order forms.
Then, the day I worked on order form files and layout (because the files had to be to Transcon by 5 o’clock), I would spend the morning working not on the order forms but on loading the top sellers press release in the CMS, and then on Friday, while doing the UK order form I would also be loading the individual category sales articles, and to keep that organized I had an index card with a grid of the article numbers and dates I needed, and I kept these for years, finally tossing them in May after not having updated the sales charts in three years.
So, in short, I would go from finishing writing the catalog text for Import Toys (the last catalog section to be written) into reviewing the sales charts spreadsheets into reviewing catalog data into writing editorial copy into writing the press release into assigning item codes into loading the press release into the CMS into reviewing the order form layouts into writing and loading the individual category sales articles into reviewing the database to make sure every item had catalog text into writing the first catalog section (Comics S-Z) of the next catalog.
It never stopped. There was never a pause to catch a breath. There was always something right behind the current thing, and I often likened it to the giant boulder at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark… except there was no corridor I could ever duck down to get out of its way. And while it was manageable in 2009, when the monthly item count was maybe 2,000 items, over time the item count grew and things could get a little hinky. I would look for ways I could make myself some mental breathing room — maybe do some of the CMS work at home in the evenings or on weekends, or process the charts at home in the evenings — to free up time at the office for the things that had to be done there.
One begins to understand why I too have a #ComicsBrokeMe story.
Which brings us to December 2011.
At the end of the year, I would get two sets of charts — December’s charts and the year-end charts. They usually came a little bit earlier — December was often a little shorter by a billing week or two, due to the holidays — but the year-end charts were also much more extensive and took longer to process.
Plus, PREVIEWS would lose two days of production due to Christmas and New Year’s, so the PREVIEWS writing deadlines were moved up and sometimes compressed while at the same time many people (not me! not me!) were taking time off, and PREVIEWS would, depending on how many weeks January had, go to press the Wednesday immediately after New Year’s, with the order forms going the next day. Absolutely no margin for error; a few years later I described the Transcon deadlines to Caitlin McCabe as something like “executing a Pluto flyby month after month.” (The New Horizons probe had had a major malfunction just before its flyby, and that was what I was referencing. The flyby was going to happen whether the probe functioned or not, and PREVIEWS and order form deadlines were the same.)
So, while the world was toasting Christmas and the New Year — and I went to see Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows on New Year’s Day — I spent my time at home trying to get ahead of everything ahead of me by preloading some of the sales charts into the CMS. Even though the charts had not been approved by DC and Marvel, at least I would have something in the CMS. Swapping out an unapproved table with an approved table, not a problem. Rewriting some of my copy, also not a problem. As they say, you can’t edit something if it’s not written first, and these articles were drafts. They were not scheduled to appear on any of the sites. They were there to be in place for me to finalize.
And therein hangs the problem, because somehow Rich Johnston of Bleeding Cool had found a way of accessing non-public articles in Diamond’s CMS. Specifically, he was getting access to retailer-only articles, as Diamond maintained both public facing websites (diamondcomics.com, PREVIEWSworld.com) and a retailer-only website (Retailer Services — you can look at the login page, and yes, that page design is every bit as old as it looks. 8pt Tahoma! Built for 800×600!). Information that should have been locked behind the retailer login had begun to appear on Bleeding Cool.
How to describe Rich Johnston? I’ve never met him. I’ve read two comics he’s written (Watchmensch and Doctor Who: Room with a Deju Vu), though I have no real memory of them, and I don’t have either anymore. (My comic collection became infested with Japanese stink bugs — long boxes are dark and cool places, great for breeding — and I tossed my collection entirely in 2013 because it wasn’t worth the time or energy to salvage. Todd Kaylor said to me at work, “I’d have bought it from you!” No, Todd, you really didn’t want it.) On some level I respected him — I admire those who speak truth to power, and I think Rich does that in an industry that mistakes marketing and PR for journalism — but I felt, and I known many others at Diamond did, too, that he sometimes made things difficult for Diamond specifically and the industry in general when he revealed the unpleasant truths or disrupted carefully laid marketing plans. And he had a schtick that annoyed me a little; he would do journalism and be a journalist, then disclaim it with, “But I’m not a journalist,” which I found disingenuous. Own what you are, sir, being comics’ muckraking Walter Winchell. I tried to stay off of his radar and out of his sight — I have him blocked on Facebook (and became quite angry with a friend some years ago who tagged Rich and myself in a post, and we really haven’t spoken since), though he found me on BlueSky at the beginning of the year, and he sent me a message that I ignored — because I valued my anonymity within the industry, and I didn’t want to be, even unintentionally, a source for him and thus put Diamond or my career at risk. Dan Manser once asked me if I had a pseudonymous commenting account at Bleeding Cool — he’d read something that he thought sounded like me — and I assured him I did not; “Dan, I barely have time to be myself, let alone someone else.” I wouldn’t interact with him or Bleeding Cool directly, but I would sometimes subtweet or subskeet in response to something he’d written. (Case in point.) It would be cryptic or random, he would never know, but I’d made my reply and life would go on.
I don’t recall exactly when the retailer-only material began appearing on Bleeding Cool. I do recall that it was an issue, and there were back and forths between Dan Manser and David Gabriel about a leaker. David thought someone at Diamond was leaking. Dan said that once it was in Daily (the email newsletter version of Retailer Services), a retailer could feed the information to Bleeding Cool, and Diamond had no way of policing that. And other publishers noticed, too; I remember Eric Stephenson at Image also had concerns about confidential information showing up publicly on Bleeding Cool. This was something running in the background through late 2011; publishers saw a problem — leaks — that needed to be solved, Dan admitted there was a problem but it wasn’t ours to solve.
I uncovered how Diamond might actually be the leaker.
The URLs on Diamond’s websites were convoluted, to say the least. They were not pretty. They looked like www.previewsworld.com/Home/1/1/71/918/109491.html, and all of those numbers in the string, before you get to the article number at the end, were keys.
In the CMS, articles would be scheduled by assigning them to a publication and then to a subsection. 71 would be the publication, 918 would be the subsection. (These are not real examples.) If one tried to pass a URL to a Diamond website and the keys were wrong, the article would not appear. There was also a date range on each article, and even if the keys were right, if one passed the URL before the start date or after the end date, or if the article had no dates (ie., it was unscheduled), again, the article would not appear. It was not a simple system — the scheduling backend was a massive page — but it was robust and secure. I could write something for the retailer website, for example, but unless I scheduled it for PREVIEWSworld it would not appear on PREVIEWSworld. That’s one of the reasons I had the index card for scheduling the sales charts; those articles were scheduled in eight or nine different places across publications and subsections.
At some point, WebDev disabled the keys.
On paper, the change actually made sense. There was content within the CMS that had evergreen value. There wasn’t a reason to reschedule an article to be “live” if all you wanted to do was to link back to it.
So I demonstrated to Dan and Andrew Gertz, probably with the Liquidation Lists (another of my many duties), by calling up retailer website articles on PREVIEWSworld by a simple manipulation of the URL.
Dan took this to WebDev. WedDev came back with, “This isn’t a problem, this is the behavior we want.” I said we at least needed some sort of key that locked retailer content, which was identifiable by the publication key, out of the public-facing websites, and we were told it was just going to be something we had to live with, that ultimately it was a nothingburger of little importance and consequence.
And then, over New Year’s, I loaded some of the sales charts into News-Manager.
December’s sales charts appeared on Bleeding Cool.
The December sales charts that had not been approved by Marvel and DC. They had them, but I was still waiting on their approvals due to the holidays.
I had angry emails from David Gabriel asking what the hell was going on. I had an email from Eric Stephenson asking why he didn’t have the charts yet. (I sent Image and Dark Horse a sales charts packet the day before the monthly press release was sent out.)
I went to Dan. He had probably already fielded an angry phone call from David that morning..
“What do we do? He got them from us.” I didn’t name Rich Johnston. I didn’t have to.
“DC could have leaked them. Marvel could have leaked them.”
“I have an angry email from David. Marvel didn’t leak these. Why would DC leak these?”
Dan said nothing.
“He got them from us.”
“Prove it.”
I went back to my desk, took my index card grid, and pulled up one of the articles. An article which was not scheduled. An article which should not have appeared on any Diamond website.
WebDev, in their redesign of what I would call, in WordPress parlance, “The Loop,” the routine that pulls a post from the database and outputs it into the webpage, not only removed the publication and section keys.
WebDev removed the date limits.
Now, Dan was correct. While I could demonstrate that it was possible to display an unscheduled article in the CMS on a Diamond webpage, I could not prove that this is what Rich Johnston had done. As unlikely and absurd as I personally thought the idea of DC or Marvel leaking the sales charts to Bleeding Cool was, it was not impossible.
I truly think that Dan was willing to let the problem go at this point. Andrew Gertz, who was the editor of Diamond Daily and the retailer website, was not. And he said to me, “So how do we prove it?”
“Well, we have to plant a honey pot in News-Manager. Something so rich and tempting that when he sees it he can’t not touch it. Something he had to report immediately because it’s such a scoop.
“Something,” I said, “like a Marvel-DC crossover.”
And I outlined what we do.
We would write a fake story. Put it in News-Manager. Leave it unscheduled so that no one should know it was there. And if it appeared on Bleeding Cool, then we know with absolute certainty that Rich Johnston had found a way to steal stories from our CMS.
Andrew liked the idea. We took it to Dan. Dan liked it and approved.
Late in the afternoon of January 3, 2012, I opened up Notepad and typed up a short article, probably not more than 150 words, about Marvel and DC teaming up on a Batman and Spider-Man mini-series that would be featured in the April PREVIEWS.
I do not know exactly what I wrote. I did not keep a copy of it, to my regret. I mentioned opening Notepad, and I often did my News-Manager writing in Notepad, marking up the text with the HTML tags because it was cleaner than what News-Manager’s TinyMCE wysiwig editor produced. It was more elegant. But writing in Notepad also speaks to the ephemeral nature of how I viewed my News-Manager writing. Very little of it was worth keeping — some examples of worthwhile writings can be found in my bibliography, I’m especially proud of my Eddie Campbell interview — and a fake article? Why would I ever need to refer to it again? Not worth keeping.
So I only have Rich Johnston’s characterization of what I wrote to go by, and he mainly delves in the the politics of DC/Marvel crossovers and why they were so unlikely at that time. There hadn’t been one since JLA/Avengers almost a decade earlier — I bought all four issues of that from Capital Comics on Glenwood in Raleigh — and it really didn’t look like there would ever be another. (There are some Batman/Deadpool crossovers coming out in the near future, and these are the first in over twenty years.) But I want to talk about why I would have suggested that particular project, a multi-issue Batman/Spider-Man crossover.
It was the DC/Marvel crossover I would have written.
Johnston writes in his piece that it was in the style of “John Byrne’s Superman/Batman Generations series,” but that’s not what I had in mind at all. I was thinking more in terms of Karl Kesel, Dave Taylor, and Robert Campanella’s Batman & Superman: World’s Finest, which charted the evolving relationship between Batman and Superman across a dozen years.
It never more than the concept stage. A project like this — charting Batman and Spider-Man across a decade or so — would never happen, and I certainly would never be in a position to write it. Yet, I saw a number of really interesting things to do, and I had a pretty good idea of what the final scene would be. I liked the idea of Bruce Wayne and Norman Osborn as business rivals and costumed rivals; Green Goblin is the Spider-Man villain who makes the most sense as a Batman foe. I imagined Spider-Man working with the Titans at some point — and a brief scene, riffing off of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, where Bobby Drake refers back to the X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover with an exasperated venting to Peter Parker, “You get to hang out with Robin! Scott [Summers, ie., Cyclops] gets to hang out with Robin! When do I get to hang out with Robin?” Jean-Paul Valley and Ben Reilly would have their chapter, and there was an untold story of how Batman stopped one of his villains from disrupting Peter and Mary Jane’s wedding.
The ending. The meta-plot has been resolved, and maybe some debt that Aunt May owed had been mysteriously paid. Batman and Spider-Man are standing together atop a skyscraper in Gotham or New York, and Batman says, “You’re a good man, Peter Parker. Never forget that.”
And Spider-Man is completely taken aback by this. Not at being called a good man, but at the fact that Batman knows who Spider-Man is. Spidey splutters for a moment, and Batman says, “I’m the world’s greatest detective. I’ve known since you were nineteen. I looked out for you from the shadows, did what I could, took care of things that time your Aunt May almost lost the house.” Then Batman takes off his cowl, and Peter realizes that he’s known Bruce Wayne for much of his adult life, having met him as a photographer for the Bugle on many occasions when Wayne was in New York on Wayne Industries business or when J. Jonah Jameson sent Peter to Gotham for some photos. They shake hands, and it’s sweet and tender.
As I said, absolutely not going to happen, and I am never going to write it. But it’s a good dream.
Also, I probably would have used the word “maxi-series.” Crisis was a maxi-series. I used the term “maxi-series” in an article about Avengers vs. X-Men, and the editorial note I got back from Marvel was, “Don’t use ‘maxi-series.’ That’s a DC term!”
The morning of January 4th. I wake up. I make coffee. I sit down at my computer and go to Bleeding Cool to see if there’s anything about a Marvel/DC crossover…
The lead story? Marvel and DC are teaming up on a Spider-Man/Batman mini-series.
I sent Dan an email that the article was on Bleeding Cool. He had also been checking, and we knew that we had Rich. The only way he could have gotten this story was from us, and the only way he could have gotten it from us was by doing some URL manipulation.
To my surprise, Dan suggested more false stories to plant for Rich Johnston to pick up, like Robert Kirkman was taking The Walking Dead to Dark Horse Comics. Besides the fact that that was transparently ridiculous, I also didn’t think it was necessary. We had what we needed, proof that our CMS was hackable, and we could go on from that. I am not going to say that embarrassing Rich publicly was not a goal — it absolutely was — but the primary goal was fixing the damn security leak in our websites by making WebDev see there was a problem.
Before I left for work, I opened two tabs to News-Manager, copied all of the article data from one, I think it was product article for an import statue or figure, and pasted it into the article I’d used for the fake Spider-Man/Batman story. Rich had seen it, if he went back to the article it would be gone and he’d see something else. It would be like it had never been.
By the time I got to work, Rich Johnston had updated his article. He knew he’d been played. Quoth Rich: “All credit to Diamond Comic Distributors on this one. I think someone there noticed that I was picking up on some stories that were running on their website, but weren’t fully linked from the home page yet. Such as Marvel’s marketshare in December, and lists of upcoming comic books for the next two weeks. So it seems they laid a trap, one written to appeal to Bleeding Cool, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Diamond ran an article on their website outlining a fictitious crossover – one that has now disappeared and I have emails from Marvel Comics peeps asking if April has come early…”
I subtweeted Bleeding Cool on Twitter…
…and then the fallout clouds began rolling in.
Bob Wayne at DC called Diamond’s Bill Schanes. It may be because Rich, in his mea culpa update, asked if he “[detected] the influence of Bob Wayne” in this little honey trap. It may be because Diamond had just done something embarrassing to DC, something that could ever jeopardize Diamond’s relationship with DC. I was not party to this conversation, I am relaying secondhand.
What I do know is that Bob Wayne in no uncertain terms wanted whoever was responsible for this fired. Bob, if you ever read this, I never held this against you, either. Again, you were protecting your turf, and I suspect it was made doubly worse by Rich bringing you into a drama you had no involvement with. If there’s anyone I want to apologize to, it’s you. I respect you too damn much to have ever wanted you involved in my shenanigans.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Manhattan, Arune Singh of Marvel was receiving congratulatory emails from industry people, and he had no idea what he was being congratulated for or why. He certainly wasn’t responsible. Again, I was not a party to this. I don’t know Arune, I don’t know that we ever exchanged an email. This is just what I was told.
Joe Quesada and Brian Michael Bendis were tweeting about this Batman/Spider-Man project enthusiastically.
And David Gabriel called Bill Schanes to say, “Good job, you guys really stuck it in Rich Johnston’s eyes!”
Bill Schanes had a problem. One of Diamond’s two biggest vendors wanted someone fired. The other of Diamond’s biggest vendors was congratulating Diamond for embarrassing someone they considered a little bit of a pest. And Bill had absolutely no idea what any of them were even talking about. You don’t leave Upper Management hanging like that. You just don’t.
Dan, who not even six hours earlier had told me we should run a fake story about The Walking Dead, let me know that my fate was hanging in the balance. I was being thrown under the bus, and I knew that.
Eric Stephenson emailed me. “I know you can’t confirm or deny anything, you may not even know who did, what happened today is appreciated.”
I wrote back, “I can’t say, but if I could I’d say thank you.”
In the afternoon Dan called Andrew Gertz and myself into his office.
I was not being fired. Marvel basically saved my job. I was not to ever do anything like that again, as I had put Diamond’s business relationships at risk.
“WebDev did that,” I said. “All I did was prove that they created a security problem.”
Dan grimaced and went on. A note would be placed in my permanent file.
I shrugged. It clearly annoyed him that I wasn’t contrite, maybe even a little proud of what I’d done. Dan let me go. I closed the door behind me.
Andrew got reamed — I could hear Dan yelling from down the hall, by Vince Brusio’s cubicle — and I never understood why, as his only role in the whole affair was to like my plan enough for us to take it to Dan for his approval. Andrew told me later it really wasn’t anything, Dan was just furious that Andrew hadn’t stopped me.
“Dan signed off on everything,” I said.
“I know,” said Andrew.
Dan would have thrown the Pope under the bus. And I say that with great affection for Dan. Seriously. Truly. Not sarcastic. Great affection.
In the days following, a few people at Diamond who knew what happened said to me, privately and quietly, that they wanted to give me some kudos for what I’d done. They could never say so loudly, but Diamond was in many ways the industry’s punching bag, Diamond never stood up for itself, and they appreciated that someone one day basically said no, stood up for the company, and punched back.
“I’m sorry you got in trouble,” one said.
“I’m not,” I said philosophically. “It needed to be done.”
Within a week, WebDev put a partial date lock back on the websites. Any article in News-Manager could appear on any of the websites, but only if the date were after the scheduled start date for the article. Thus, once an article was written, even if it was past the scheduled date range, it could be linked to and opened.
No key was ever restored that would prevent retailer-only content from being accessible from the public-facing websites, though. That was not considered important. Which, in a way, is actually good, as I can link to retailer articles on Diamond’s public sites for examples of my work in my job hunt, like this “red ball” article I wrote on Power Ranger Zeo figures. (“Red ball” is a term from Homicide: Life on the Streets. The request for this article came as I was about to pack it in for the day, and it needed to be done immediately. I liked the way it looked, I liked the way it came together. Yeah, I’m proud of it.)
After this, to quote Dave Bowen, “WebDev is scared of you. You know too much.” If decoding URLs is “knowing too much,” then, yes, I know too much. :rolleyes:
I summed up the whole affair a few days later on my blog. Simply, “It’s been a week.”
And I never did do it again. Oh, I’d have fun with my PREVIEWS copy sometimes — there was the time I irritated Mike Schimmel with a reference to “Cummerbund Bandersnatch” in a Doctor Strange Funko POP! description, and, of course, my descriptions for the Oasis Funko POP!s are, as Oasis fans might say, “fuckin’ biblical” (and I did, in fact, buy them both) — but planting false stories? Messing with a journalist or a publisher? Nope. Diamond had been, in some way, a part of my life since April 1991, and I loved the comic industry too much and too long to ever do anything that might harm it.
Dan Manser and Bill Schanes might have felt I’d put Diamond’s relationships with the industry at risk, but from where I sat then, from where I sit today, even with all of the chaos of the past five years, what I did in January 2012, poking Bleeding Cool in the eye, was about protecting the relationships because we had done something to protect our vendors. And I feel it was worth it.
Rich Johnston backed off a little — he was still a thorn in the side, but that’s just who he is — and life went on.
History became legend, and legend became myth, and the story of the time Diamond pwned Bleeding Cool became legend.
I always promised myself that, when the day came and I left Diamond, I would peel back the legend and reveal the history. I expect some “recollections may vary” from others, but this is how it happened.
Rich, it wasn’t Bob Wayne who orchestrated this. It’s been long enough, and you of all people deserve the truth.
It was me. In my best Dame Diana Rigg, I want you know it was me.
No hard feelings?
And an epilogue.
My fifth anniversary at Diamond came around in May, and I received a book of anniversary gifts I could choose from. Now approaching forty, I decided to be practical instead of frivolous, and as I didn’t have a blender, that’s what I chose.
A Hamilton Beach blender. It’s red.
It is an absolutely terrible blender. Staring at what I want blended blends more effectively than this blender. I could have replaced it sometime in the intervening years, but no. It was my anniversary gift!
I couldn’t possibly part with it. I had to not be fired to even get it!
None at all!