VOL. 1 • ISSUE NO. 18
DIXIELAND CONSULTING — PENSACOLA, FL
10¢
THE PATRIOT KID
“The Seat Nobody Sits In”
⚡︎ THE RETYPING TAX ⚡︎
IT WISDOM — WITH HUMOR
PANEL 1 — THE RENEWAL
📧
An email lands: "Your plan renews in 3 days." The owner glances at it, thinks "that's the scheduling thing," and clicks away. It renews every month. It has for two years.
PANEL 2 — THE TOUR
🖥️
The Kid, visiting, asks to see the scheduling tool. The team opens it. The last login was eleven months ago. Everyone now uses a shared spreadsheet instead.
PANEL 3 — THE QUESTION
🤔
"So who actually uses this?" asks the Kid. Silence. "Dana set it up." "Dana left in the spring." Nobody has opened it since Dana. Nobody canceled it either.
PANEL 4 — THE MATH
🧮
The Kid does the sum out loud. $___ a month, paid for ___ months after the last login. That's $___ for software with zero users. The room goes quiet.
PANEL 5 — THE FIX
✂️
No new system needed. One person is put in charge of the subscription list. They read every renewal email before it charges. This one gets canceled today.
PANEL 6 — THE PAYOFF
📋
A short list now lives in a shared doc: what we pay for, who uses it, who owns it. Next renewal, somebody will actually look before it goes through.
⚡︎ PATRIOT KID TECH CORNER ⚡︎
Nobody owns the invoice
Subscriptions outlive the people who set them up. When the champion leaves, the charge keeps going but the reason walks out the door. Assign an owner to every recurring tool.
Auto-renew is the default
Most tools renew silently. The email is easy to ignore because canceling takes effort and paying takes none. That asymmetry is how dead subscriptions survive for years.
A list beats a memory
You don't need software to fix this. One shared document listing every paid tool, its cost, its users, and its owner will catch the ones nobody opens any more.
Got an IT problem worthy of a comic? Tell Chuck about it.