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After decades of leading a very wasteful life, Bob (or “Wasteful Bob,” as his friends call him) is committed to following a new and more efficient path in 2016.

No more leaving the water faucets on all day; keeping his car running all night in the driveway; leaving his non-production AWS instances on all night even when no one was using them; or otherwise squandering or frittering away precious resources—either at home or in his job as an IT Operations Director.

Bob’s conversion to a more intentionally resourceful way of thinking and acting began in a somewhat odd place: At AWS re:Invent 2015. It was there that he ran across ParkMyCloud, a web app that is essentially a programmable on/off switch for AWS EC2 instances.

Genius!

After returning from AWS re:Invent, Wasteful Bob signed up for ParkMyCloud’s 30-Day Free Trial and loved it. With just a few keystrokes, he could set “parking” calendars for periods when he knew no one at his company would be using certain non-production AWS instances. As a result, Bob’s company would not incur any charges for these parked instances.

Now, with January upon him, Bob looked at his list of resolutions and saw at the top, “go to more events.” He didn’t recall putting that on his list or why he should attend more events. But regardless, he dutifully Googled “tech events” and found something called TechBreakfast, which featured presentations by several emerging technology companies to an audience of area technology folks.

Jay Chapel @ParkMyCloud presenting ParkMyCloud at Boston @TechBreakfast pic.twitter.com/TCBtSUtmau

— TechBreakfast (@TechBreakfast) January 5, 2016

When Bob arrived at TechBreakfast, he couldn’t believe how small his world was getting: One of the presenters was the CEO of ParkMyCloud (pictured above), the web app that was saving his company so much money on AWS costs each month.

Bob listened intently to the CEO’s brief presentation, which did a decent job of explaining the rationale behind ParkMyCloud (he called it a “pain point,” which sounded like marketing-speak) and how the product worked. Except for the CEO’s plaid shirt, which was a bit too bold for Bob’s taste, Bob liked everything he heard and saw.

Apparently others in the audience were also very interested in ParkMyCloud as they peppered the CEO with questions, like:

• How big does a company have to be to need ParkMyCloud? (CEO: “We have a customer that only has 6 servers, and they love it.”)
• How long does the set up really take? (CEO: “About 7 – 10 minutes.”)
• How secure is it? (CEO: “It resides in AWS and it is encrypted…per the FAQs on ParkMyCloud.com.”)
• Isn’t your pricing too low? (CEO: “Yes, we’re working on it.”)

Well played, Mr. CEO!

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In the meantime…

When Bob returned home that night, he embarked on a little personal re-branding project. He had long become accustomed to the ribbing by his friends, co-workers and even family members about his wasteful ways and had good-naturedly, if grudgingly, accepted their moniker for him: Wasteful Bob.  

But in 2016 that nickname no longer fit. Being a fairly literal soul—like so many others in his IT/engineering cohort, Bob decided he needed a more descriptive nickname. Without any irony at all, he said to himself, “Formerly Wasteful Bob. Yup, that’s it.”

So hello, 2016, Formerly Wasteful Bob!