I went on holiday and my inbox did the negotiating

01Lived

I got involved in the internet during its pioneering days, and went through a phase of registering dot-com domain names, picking them up cheap. One I really liked was consumerology, which I’d registered years before and which had sat there doing nothing ever since. Then one summer I took the family on holiday to Cornwall. Normally I’d have done some work in the evenings, but the weather was miserable and the kids needed cheering up, so for once I did none at all, and for a whole week I never even checked my email. When I got home I found a trail of messages waiting, all about consumerology. The first said, in words to this effect, ‘Hey mate, your domain name consumerology, it’s really cool, I’ll give you a few quid for it.’ Because I hadn’t responded, another had arrived, and then another, the urgency, professionalism and seriousness rising with each one, until there were eleven or twelve of them spanning about a week. The last, which had landed the very day I returned, explained that they were an American company interested in acquiring consumerology, and would I please call their solicitor. My immediate thought was: thank god I never answered the earlier ones. So I made the call, found myself speaking with an American lawyer in London, and over the following week or so we negotiated a price in the tens of thousands of dollars. Then I caught the train down, signed the papers in an ballroom-sized office, and came away with the cheque. The buyer, it turned out, was a major American healthcare company creating a public-facing think tank full of Harvard professors, and they wanted consumerology badly, to be the front of it.