December 8, 2003
Incompetence makes Vertigogirl Swear* (*though sometimes only in abbreviations) 
The office manager at our clinic is incompetent. Perhaps she has been able to get things done in the past - she has worked with them for years and years - but she just doesn't seem to be able to handle the job anymore. She's past retirement age and is only working a couple days a month at the clinic and unfortunately, there's no one to replace her, which is why she's still there messing things up. Don't even get me started on what happens when one of the receptionists goes away and she is working the front desk...
Often, her messes are pretty minor - putting things in the wrong column when she's adding up who gets paid what for the credit and debit card transactions or spelling my name wrong in the yellow pages ad (2 years in a row!). More recently, her shoddy work has had more severe consequences - i.e. we lost our domain name because she didn't bother to let me know about the domain renewal requests until 2 months past the expiry date (she claimed that she didn't know what it was about, since she'd had nothing to do with the website, which is in her mind, I guess, an acceptable reason for letting a "final notice" email from September 24 sit on her desk until November 29 before talking to me about it). WTF?!!
So now we have a Russian cyber-squatter. Some UF named Igor Vladimirovich Sumkin from Moscow bought echelonrehab.ca. And after a Google search of his name, I discovered that this isn't the first time he's been at it.
According to platinum-celebs.com's Daily Internet News on September 1, 2003:
Looking for Florida's Winter Haven Police Department website on the Internet can put you someplace you might not want to be. Police officials were surprised to learn recently that an old department website has been taken over by a Russian pornographer. Police Chief Darrell Kirkland says, "When I learned about it and saw what the site depicted, I called the IT (Information Technology) department. This happens every day all over the United States and it's unfortunate." According to Network Solutions, the organization that registers domains, the domain was registered on the 26 July (03) to a Russian man named Igor Vladimirovich Sumkin in Moscow. Calling up the department's old site will lead web surfers to a site that depicts a shapely nude woman. An advisory on the page warns in German that the site is intended for adults only. And if that's not surprise enough, when the Web site visitor tries to close out of the site, a series of hard-core pornography pages appears. But eventually the Google search engine's German site appears and no further pornography appears on the screen.
Our pal Igor has also apparently cybersquatted a few other sites:
www.rwmontessori.org (formerly belonging to a montessori school in Canada);
www.sportscotland.org (formerly belonging to Sports Scotland);
www.unionchurchofbayridge.org (formerly belonging to a church);
www.petermurphy.org (formerly belonging to musician Peter Murphy);
A few days ago I looked at our former site and noticed a "We're under construction, come back soon" notice. My old title tags were still there so he was trying to still funnel our traffic his way, but luckily the lack of content on the site has pulled it off Google searches. Unfortunately, the URL is all over various documentation from the clinic, including my business cards.
Theovis wrote to CIRA - the group that maintains the .ca domains - for me because one of the regulations for owning a .ca is that it be a Canadian company. Obviously Igor doesn't fit the bill but when we didn't hear back from them I started looking into their dispute resolution information, and I've kind of lost hope that we're going to get anywhere.
This leaves us with a couple solutions: we can wait it out and hope CIRA will kick him off the domain. We can find out how much the prick wants for the domain name. We can cut our losses, move the site to echelonrehab.com (which I just bought) and count on the traffic we'll get that way to counteract the hassle of changing our documentation to the new URL. In the long run, I'm thinking that the last solution is the best one because I can get a site up right away and move on, with me as the contact person for any website related questions.
Currently, calling up echelonrehab.ca isn't bringing up any page at all, which might mean that CIRA is at work removing the domain from Igor's evil clutches, or it might mean that he's just getting ready to porn the hell out of anyone who goes looking for our nice healthcare website.
Which leaves me with only one possible response:
Fuck you, Igor. I hope you rot.
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