The legacy-rescue letter

For the doctrine's first target: the weird, the old, the hard. Aimed at a company visibly running something aged or strange: a job posting that mentions VB6, RPG, FoxPro, an AS/400, a twenty-year-old ERP, "our custom system", or a machine on the floor with its own protocol. One email, personalized in the SLOT lines, sent by Brad from his own address.

The slots

• {FIRST_NAME}, {COMPANY}: obvious.
• {OBSERVED_SIGNAL}: the load-bearing line. The specific, public thing that told us an old system lives there. If we cannot write it honestly, no send. Examples:
  • "Your maintenance posting mentions an AS/400, which tells me something important still runs on it."
  • "You are hiring for a system your posting calls 'legacy', which usually means the people who understood it are gone."
• {PHYSICAL_ADDRESS}: required in the footer by CAN-SPAM.

Subject lines

1. The system nobody at {COMPANY} wants to touch
2. Old software is not the problem
3. We like the projects everyone else turned down

The letter

---

{FIRST_NAME},

{OBSERVED_SIGNAL}

I am an engineer in Grand Rapids, and I want to be direct about something most consultants will not say: I like old systems. The strange protocol, the twenty-year-old application everyone is afraid to restart, the machine on the shop floor that speaks its own language. For fun, I keep a transistor-level simulation of a 1975 microchip running on the public internet. For work, I have spent fifteen years inside large, old, critical systems for enterprise and government, including a network of sixty small computers speaking a radio protocol I wrote myself.

Here is what I have learned in those fifteen years: old software is usually not the problem. The problem is that nobody left understands it, nothing is written down, and every vendor who visits says the only cure is to rip it out and buy theirs. A rewrite is sometimes right. It is recommended far more often than it is right, because it is what the recommender sells.

My first step is different: I learn your system and write down what it actually does, so the knowledge stops living in one retiring employee's head. Then you get options in writing: keep it running safely, connect it to something modern, or replace it, with honest numbers on each. You choose with the facts in hand.

My rates are public at bradley.io/services: $150 to $275 an hour, projects $25K to $100K. No surprises is the product.

Full disclosure, because it is the whole point: this letter was drafted by an AI that I operate, every word was reviewed and signed by me, and the entire operation is documented in the open at housecalls.bradley.io. We are out to prove AI can be used for good, at a reasonable price.

If there is a system at {COMPANY} that everyone tiptoes around, I would like to meet it.

Bradley Isenbek bradley.io · Grand Rapids, Michigan {PHYSICAL_ADDRESS}

P.S. If this is not relevant, one reply saying so and you will never hear from us again. That is a promise, and it is logged.

---

Claims audit

Claim	Source
15 years, large/old/critical systems, enterprise + government	resume / site-data.json bio
Transistor-level 1975 chip simulation, public	bradley.io/6502, live
60-node network, custom radio protocol	services page: "60-node Pi cluster running custom 802.11"
Rates	bradley.io/services, live

Rules of engagement

Same as the cloud-exit letter: draft-for-approval, one email per prospect, no cold SMS ever, dedicated warmed sending subdomain, every step to the /housecalls ledger with the prospect anonymous until they reply.