The fashion business had email.
I finished setting up Google Apps for SuzieQ Fashion and created the first two inboxes. The remaining question was how many extra addresses and aliases the team wanted.
This was small work compared with the data-center projects filling most of my day. It still mattered. A business can have clothes, customers, a domain, and a plan, but it does not feel fully real until mail starts arriving at its own address.
I sent a short set of instructions. Here is the login page. Use the company username. Tell me if anything does not work.
The original note also included the temporary credentials in plain text, which was normal enough in 2010 and not something I would repeat now.
I had been helping with the technical edge of small fashion projects for a while: websites, domains, old laptops, software, and whatever other setup stood between an idea and somebody being able to work on it. None of it was a formal company for me. It was simply the part I knew how to do.
That kind of side work fit easily into my life. I was running infrastructure at Reality Check, still helping Peek with its network, looking for additional retainer clients, and setting up email for people close to me.
The scale changed from hour to hour. One message could be about a storage cluster or carrier connection. The next could be two inboxes for a clothing business.
I liked both. The larger systems were interesting because of their complexity. The small ones were satisfying because the result was immediate. Before the setup, the team could not use its own domain for mail. Afterward, it could.
The addresses worked. The rest was up to the business.