Washing My Hands Of It

Today’s post is a rant, a rant about a guy who screwed me over with false promises, to be more accurate, Michael Bourne, the guy behind the Stoner Nation twitter account and one of the money backers for the upcoming Cheech and Chong Animated movie. This is a very long rant but I feel it is necessary for me to share this information with anyone who wants to read it. There are currently a couple people still dealing with Michael’s drama and I hope this opens their eyes a little bit.

*Side note – I paid for a pre-ordered copy of the Cheech and Chong animated movie, as did a couple other people when Michael posted a link to do so. I have no idea when the movie is coming out and what is going to happen with the people who pre-ordered this movie. Had I known what kind of guy Michael Bourne really was I would have never promoted him or the movie to my friends and family.

*Everything that I have written below is my personal experience with Michael Bourne, I can not talk for others who have claimed to have been swindled by Michael, I can only share my personal experience.

As some of you may know I was doing some work for Michael’s website as a blogger. I helped provide content for his site to help promote both his twitter account and the Cheech and Chong movie. As a fan of Cheech and Chong I was honored to be a part of this “promo campaign.” I did some free image work for fun to help out and eventually I went to Michael with the idea to add some entertainment news/reviews for his site to draw in more of an audience. The current content for the site at the time was all marijuana related news and I thought he could reach a bigger audience by expanding his content. I offered to write up iPhone application reviews and movie reviews etc. (more or less what I do on this site now) to drive more traffic to his site.

Things were going great for a while, Michael offered to pay me $500 every two weeks to write a daily blog post, he even gave me an advance to go and buy an iPhone so that I can stay on top of iPhone applications. Two months go by and I having a great time doing these reviews, its a dream job to say the least. It was something that I could easily do that wouldn’t get in the way of my schooling, and it was great friggin money.

But then something happened and all hell broke loose. There was some drama between some of the other bloggers that Michael had “employed” and the site was taken down. I could care less about what was going on between Michael and the other bloggers, my focus was on doing a good job and collecting a pay check. When the site was taken down I was still wanting to do work for Michael , he had been nice to me and I enjoyed what I was doing and wanted to keep doing more. SO I kept doing work for Michael under the impression that I was going to continue getting paid.

Obviously I was wrong. August came around and Michael had gone on a trip or whatever and said that he had gotten a really sever sunburn and was ill so he wasn’t able to get my payment out for that week. I totally understood, you’re sick and can’t get payment out, whatever its cool, let me know when you’re better and we can get this payment out. A week or so goes by with no response from Michael , so i message him to see what’s up. Michael replies that he is now being audited. Little did I know that this audit was going to last 3+ months.

This is when I started thinking to myself that this guy doesn’t want to pay me for my work and he is trying to get me to more or less go away. I start emailing Michael regularly to try and get what was promised to me. There is $2,000 that Michael had agreed to pay me, this would be the last payment that I would receive and things would be cleared up and we would go our separate ways.

Below are some of our exchanges on twitter. This isn’t all the messages sent back and forth between me and Michael but it is a good chunk of them.

This is where I am like “sweet, he said his audit is over and I will get paid soon

Twitter direct messages aren’t the best form of communication. But apparently he lied to me about the audit being over

Obviously I start to think that he is trying to get out of paying me and I bring that to his attention and he get’s super defensive about it

We clear up the trust issue and I am under the impression that I will finally be getting paid soon

I then decided to see if maybe a Western union wire would be easier for him rather then setting up a PayPal account. But apparently the audit that he said was over in the first set of messages is still continuing. Maybe if you weren’t a lie scum bag the IRS would be all over our ass bud.

once again get super defensive about it. He brings up the money that he paid me for doing my job for him like he was doing me a favor, no sir, you were my employer, you weren’t doing me a favor, you were paying me for a job.

I think this is one of my favorite exchanges, he tells me that the audit is all over (for the 2nd) time and that he will be able to pay me in the next couple days once everything “cycles back to him” So I send him another message a few days later and to my surprise he still can’t pay me….

Finally I got fed up with all the lies and stories and excuses and vented on twitter. As soon as he saw my rant he messaged me. I love how everything gets turned on me because he’s the one who’s being a scumbag and won’t pay me what we agreed on.

I know this is a really long post and most of you probably don’t care at all, but I felt the need to vent. I posted today that I am completely done with trying to chase promises that will never come true. I am slightly saddened by the end result of this situation but I just have to chalk it up to a life experience. Sometimes you deal with swindling scumbags, it’s part of life. I am actually kind of mad at myself because I knew this sort of thing is Michael ’s M.O. when I found an article about his backing out of a deal with the musician Genuwine which you can read here: http://www.trevoraaronson.com/story/?storyID=12

I should have known that if he is willing to back out on a multimillion dollar deal with a well known musician, why wouldn’t he back out of paying $2k to some random guy he got to blog/promote for him. I have a feeling that I will be getting a message or an email from Michael in the near future about this post, but honestly I could care less. I will no longer have anything to do with Michael Bourne or his twitter account. I am done dealing with shady people.

PS: I thought i would add this last tidbit in for anyone who actually read this whole thing. Michael had promised to take his “employees” to the 2009 Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, talk about a once in a life time experience. I quickly went out and bought my passport in preparation for the trip and came to find out that it was all lies. I felt like a complete asshole when I told my friends and family that I would be going to Amsterdam to promote the movie and then came to realize it was all false promises.

Michael , if you are reading this I would like to thank you for allowing me to have this life experience, I am now aware of what to look out for when working with people in the future.

Filed Under: Featured • Thoughts

Tags: bad business practice, cheech and chong, cheech and chong animated movie, Featured, lies, micheal bourne, stoner nation