Customer Service, Where Ha' Ye Gone?

In what is now the past, I had a few interesting times dealing with reputable businesses. Hold on a sec. Maybe I should qualify that. I'd have to call one of them a formerly reputable business.

I had a hosting company, in the sense that I contracted with them for services. My first account worked out really well. They were a relatively small company that the owners had built from the ground up. They were on top of things and had created a bunch of custom features and though not a giant company had a good reputation.

I bought in. I had a few small problems, mostly due to inexperience on my part, and the service was great. I always sent a final email thanking the service technician when my problem got resolved. I figured that I owed. I figured that people like to be thanked. And I was grateful.

Times were good. My site stayed up, it worked perfectly, I added to it, and had no further problems. So after almost two years with this company, they were the obvious choice for my second site.

A few months before this I'd seen a few emails coming in about the hosting company "joining forces" with some other company. Or maybe they called it "teaming up", or something like that. I vaguely wondered if something unfortunate was going on, but since nothing seemed to be changing, I ignored it. About the only change I could see was that they were offering more services at lower prices. Whatever.

Not too very long after setting up my second account I began checking it every morning. Every now and then the site would be unresponsive. I wondered if my internet service provider or my DSL provider was having problems, but then before I could get too worked up things seemed to resolve themselves.

This happened maybe once a week for a few minutes. Then it seemed to be getting worse, but it was sporadic. I'd had some problems early on with my DSL provider, a major phone company whose telephone support had been vile. But they had been OK for several years now. I wondered if I was getting hosed by them again, or if my ISP was mucking around, though they had been dead reliable and even had helped me figure out that the phone company was lying to me when outages were really the phone company's fault.

Anyway, one day my site simply did not work. I checked everything I could. Browser OK (I had four installed). Computer on and running. Other web sites came up OK. In fact I could access any other web site that I could think of except my own site number two.

After pulling some hair out and thrashing around looking to define the problem, my site was suddenly there again. This happened several times over the following weeks. It seemed to be down about 20 to 30 minutes, and then it was back. I kept notes.

Finally one day when this was happening I submitted a support request to the web host, documenting what I'd seen. The logs for my site showed nothing and there were no reports from the hosting company, or notes in their forums.

The response I got was to let them know if it happened again. I think I ate my tongue. But after a few minutes I got back on track and let it slide.

Then a few days later it happened again. After a half hour of thrashing around checking things I saw my site come up again, but five minutes later it went down and didn't come back for another 20, so I submitted another support request. And got pretty much the same response, so I kept after them, saying that I'd at least expect them to check things and let me know what they checked, when, and supplying some proof.

I got a condescending response from someone who said he was a technical support supervisor. He mentioned a couple of things that weren't all that deep and basically let me know that they were not interested in following up on my problem.

OK fine. I love you too.

About a week after that my site disappeared again. The original site was still doing fine. I never did have a problem with that, but the newer one was down. I decided to log on to the control panel and check the logs. I don't know much about web servers and the back end stuff, but I can make some sense of it.

Except that I couldn't get there. The whole server had disappeared from the internet. I checked the company's forums for an announcement, and checked my email inbox but found no news, so I submitted another support request in case they were unaware. I got a reply that they knew there was a problem. And beyond that they supplied nothing else, ever.

A couple of days later I received an email notifying me that my request for support had been resolved, so I queried them. They said that after three days of inactivity, their system considers all support requests to have been resolved. Period. Thank you very much now go away.

Then my site went down again and so did the server. Totally gone.

I submitted another support request and asked that it go straight to a supervisor. I said I was fed up with a web site that kept disappearing, and a server that did the same and wanted some answers and a resolution.

OK, children, now it gets fun.

After some back and forth the person identifying himself as a technical support supervisor told me three interesting things.

One was that they would provide no support for application programming problems. He said that if I was having problems with my web site I should contact my developer and work things out there.

I had a contact form on my site which had been working fine, but after the server disappeared it stopped working. Cold. Dead. I hadn't touched the site in several weeks and made this clear several times. Nevertheless, this guy had to make a point of telling me not to even think of getting any help of that kind.

Up to that moment it hadn't occurred to me for the obvious reason that I had had a perfectly working site and hadn't changed a thing. It could not be my faulty code.

The second thing this guy said was that they would provide zero help configuring anything whatsoever within my account. Since I was on an Apache server on Linux, there were .htaccess files and file permissions and things to fiddle with. But I hadn't, and hadn't asked for help either.

Then the third thing I was told was that if I thought that the goofiness I had been experiencing were due to hardware, operating system or server software problems, it was my job to verify it (right, from my apartment 1500 miles away), document it, and tell them exactly what they had to do to fix their system.

And by the way, we didn't notify anyone or put the outages on our company forum because that's reserved for major outages. (He didn't answer when I said that having my server disappear was a major outage for me.)

Talk about your body slam.

So there I was, having been told that no matter where the problem was, they were not going to do anything to help. Thank you very much and please don't call again.

Luckily my first account had only about a month to run, so I found another host that looked good. I even queried one of its customers. Everything sounded OK. A little more expensive, but I could consolidate two accounts into one for about the same total cost.

So then I notified the first company that I was going to move my first account, and in case I missed the deadline I did not want my account to be automatically renewed (which they normally do). This unleashed another load of stuff that went right into the fan.

It so happens that they have no way of closing an account unless they do it immediately. Their system is set up in such a way that they cannot indicate that an account just runs out and dies. According to them. So they could either close it immediately or if I ran over they would have to bill me for another entire year and then refund me (if things worked out that way).

The information on the company wiki said something else, but they didn't accept that. I got into a major email battle and made it clear that I would consider it fraud, and fight them up one side and down the other. All that fun stuff. They kept saying that the giant robot in the back room would not listen to them. Etcetera. It was lovely.

I spent about two weeks updating the style sheets for my site (on my desktop) simplifying them and bring them up a notch or two in quality. I finished that and got my site moved over to the new host without a problem, and then managed to cancel my account with about a week left to run. Later I noticed that they had changed the company wiki to explicitly say that they could not cancel in advance.

A few weeks later I was ready to move my second site. First I had to get my domain name pointing at the new host's servers. I went into the control panel about three times and for the life of me could find no option to let me make the change.

Sounds like it's time to submit another support request. So I did, lucky me.

The reply I got was "You could change the domain nameservers via BackStage >> Domains >> [redacted].com, click on the 'Edit' button on the left and then you will be able to do that. Hope this helps."

Like I hadn't' been there.

So I replied, and told them that there was no 'Edit' button and sent a screen capture.

Of course the reply I got (from a different monkey) was "Hi, On Domains tab: [redacted].com click on that 'Edit' to change nameservers."

Lovely day in the neighborhood. Lovely.

Eventually, out of desperation I went looking around some more and accidentally stumbled on that elusive 'Edit' button under the name of the account that I had closed about a month earlier. I'm sure they never expected me to find it there, but I did.

So after gluing most of my hair back on I closed that account too, with 16 months to run. No refund of course. They'd never think of that, but I'm glad to be free, and the new hosting company is another small one, with real people working there, and it's their livelihood and they don't offer the lowest prices but they are actually on the job.

So far it's working.

Part two in this story is about a gift to my sister.

I sort of missed Xmas. I wanted to get her something. Life has been especially unkind to her since her birthday is about two weeks before Xmas, and she's been shorted all her life. Mine is in the warm months so I never had that sort of conflict. I can't understand why my parents didn't move her birthday to July instead. They muffed it and she has suffered.

So I owed her. I haven't been that good either, but now that I'm a geezer I realize I won't have another six decades to put it off. If I don't do something now, maybe there won't be a next year to make it up.

Chocolate and coffee seemed good.

I ordered some chocolate. Goofy web site but pretty good deals. Fantastic service. When you submit your order you can specify delivery options, such as an acceptable temperature range, or let them decide when it's cool enough to send chocolate, and so on.

An email confirming the order arrived shortly, then another one told me when the order shipped, and included a UPS tracking number. I followed the order and notified my sister when it had arrived, in case maybe it hadn't really. Then I got another email confirming that the order had been delivered. Everything went beautifully.

I've been buying coffee locally from a great company for 20 years. This was a good chance to share with my sister, and since the coffee company had an online store, all I had to do was order and pay, and let it all rip.

RIP. You know what that means, but I didn't get too much peace out of this one.

I selected two pounds of premium beans, then went to check out. I entered my billing info, credit card number and all that, but when I put my sister's name and address into the shipping address form the system changed the billing info to the shipping info.

I found this out after I submitted the order, on a summary screen. Too late, Jake.

I had to log on to the site (you need to set up an account in order to order) and filled out a contact form notifying them of the difference between the shipping and billing addresses (and that they were two different people). Silence.

I kept checking with my sister. No coffee.

After about a week I logged back into the coffee site and saw a note about the order having been shipped, but there was nothing else there. No tracking number, no way to follow up on anything. After 10 days my sister informed me that the order still hadn't arrived so I logged onto the site one more time and sent them a few flames. I gave them a day and a half to provide me with a definite delivery date, which had to be within the following week, or I'd have to cancel the order and demand a refund.

So then I get an email. Finally someone wants to talk.

Dear sir, so sorry. Order has been faithfully delivered. Here is fabled UPS tracking number. Please see for yourself. Meanwhile we are sending a duplicate shipment Real Soon Now just in case. So sorry please.

It was about then that my sister went snooping out in the office of her apartment complex and found that her original order had indeed arrived and gotten stuffed away somewhere. Since they hadn't notified her (as they used to do) she hadn't thought of going out digging around.

The other half of this is that if I had had a tracking number in the first place I could have told her to go look on a particular date, to verify that it had or had not actually been delivered.

So I'm a butthead. My sister is at fault for not being curious enough to look for something that she did not know was coming, and the merchant created a bad experience by being secretive about all of this. I still don't know if the second, courtesy order has even been shipped. I just logged in to the web site and the address was still wrong, about a week later. And so on.

Great coffee though.

(Original post was written in 2008 but I'm still mad.)

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Glad I forgot which hosting company that was.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Getting Your Head On Straight

There is a fundamental problem in building software, and that is deciding what to build. It is fundamental because everything else rests on this one decision, and it is often overlooked, or made in the wrong way. Because everything else depends on it, you have to start at ground level, from first principles, if you want to make a sound decision.

Thinking from first principles is simple but hard. Very hard.

The need for a piece of software may come from several directions. It may arise because of a critical need of the business. Then again it may be only a perceived need. It could be an impulse, driven by one strong personality or the tide of politics internal to the business. This would not be good.

You may need software because of new laws that must be complied with, from fear of competition, or just because you're feeling a little behind and want to keep up with trends by copying everyone else.

A good reason will arise from a true need, and if carried through it may result in a real benefit to your business. If you are working from faulty principles though, you will have not only a poor foundation but a poor result.

You need to know your business through and through. And your customers. One way or another you are in business to do something for someone else, something they cannot do, or do not want to do, so they come to you. If you can deliver they will be glad to pay you what you need to get by. But you do have to keep their needs in sight.

Somewhere along the way you will have to deal with staff, even if you are self-employed. The people you directly employ are the experts in running the business. They know how things work, and when, and all of them are acutely aware of exactly everything that does not work. They are your surface of contact with customers, the membrane your business breathes through, its nerve endings.

Staying close to your customer's needs is critical, but so is anticipating where they might be going, so you need to make your decisions match the long term interests of the business. With the customers, and your staff, and the long term in mind, go for the greatest gain possible from the minimum investment, but always focusing on that "greatest gain".

Plan to start small, with something functional, something you can use tomorrow, or the day after, but don't shoot for something sometime next year. You need to start small and see how it feels, then let the software evolve and accrete over time while it's being used, and lead you to a successful end point.

Evolution is a wonderful thing, and it has a proven track record.

If you build software that your business really needs, and start small, and keep adding to it, then you will get to keep testing it every day, starting from the first day, when that software is still very small and very simple.

Daily stressing of any living thing is the best way to have it grow up to be strong. The more you use the first parts you create, the more time you will have to fill all the gaps, and build more and more strength. As time goes by, your foundation will be more than strong enough to support the whole edifice, no matter how big it gets, and the whole structure will have been thoroughly tested by time.

By starting small you will also be able to stay within your budget, and within your competence, and assess all risks. You can measure small things pretty easily, so when faced with small problems you will be able to head them off, knowing that they do exist, and knowing exactly where they are, and that they are small. You can also measure progress a whole lot better on a small project. Because it is small, it is small enough to understand.

By starting small you can also keep an eye on resources. Not just money, but time and the energy of your staff as well. Burning through your money, wasting your time, and flaming out your staff are all bad, but much less likely to happen when your project starts small and grows organically.

Then, with a little success under your belt, and because you have learned to assess risks and measure resources, you can think about going outside your areas of maximum comfort and competence and gradually branch into new areas.

But first, last, and always, you have to keep your head on straight. There are some deep pits to fall into. Maybe you don't need software at all. If you do, you will likely be better off buying something rather than building it.

If you do decide to build software, there are two attitudes you especially want to avoid. One is dismissive, and it runs something like "Why should I have to get involved? You're the computer people. You should know what to do."

The other is arrogant, and follows the rule that we all have running around in our heads, no matter who we are, that if I don't understand something, then it can't be important, so I don't have to pay attention to it.

Considering that about 80% of software projects still fail all these decades after computer programming became a thing, you really want to avoid a losing attitude. If you are going down the route of building software, then you have to be real. You have to be serious about knowing what you want, why you want it, and what it will do.

You need a real plan, you need coordination, and you have to measure everything and make sure that you are on track. You need to keep checking your sanity all the way through, and every day you need to wonder if this is really the right thing to be doing.

If you don't treat software development like a real job, it can eat you up and put you right out of business. It happens every day.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Yep.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Who, Me?

There seems to be a lack of individual responsibility around these days. Maybe that's just me. Maybe it's always been this way. Probably. Some things I don't notice so good.

I've always been surprised by how lazy and opportunistic people are. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not as bright as I've thought, or maybe I just haven't caught on yet to the true meaning of life. Something like that. I guess that I haven't caught on to massive sloth and grabbing what's easy.

I noticed during job interviews, or even worse, while on the job, that I scared people when I told them I stood 100% behind my work. Don't know why. That seems like a good characteristic to me, but it's never flown. People get spooked. Someone once asked me if I carry a gun.

Maybe a lot of them are scared to see someone care. Most of my working life has been in state government, where, if you swing through the trees, you see a lot of sleepy apes. The entire point of a bureaucrat's life is not to do anything. If you do anything you can be blamed, but you can never be blamed for not doing any one thing. Everyone in that kind of environment understands the idea of making decisions judiciously, without question: i.e., doing nothing.

That's why it can take a year to get a stapler unless you steal one from a desk that's just been vacated.

That world works that way because there is never a positive incentive. There is no profit sharing. No bonuses. You don't get big stock options if you bet your job and a lot of company resources on a bold gamble. There is none of that, only the opposite.

Negative incentives.

What is, is. The status quo is the highest good. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." "We've never done it that way." So, try something, muck up, and the only option is punishment. ("We warned you.") Do well and you mess up the status quo. The only option for that is also punishment. Keeping up appearances is the highest good, and it's not good to make the others look bad in comparison to yourself. ("You aren't being fair to everyone else.")

I've worked with people who were demoted and moved across town into jobs they knew nothing about only because they happened to work for someone else who lost a turf war. I've seen a talented and experienced programmer given a desk and chair and nothing else, expected to sit there until he gave up and quit, only because he once spoke the truth. I know someone who, as a project manager whose project failed, was promoted fol following the rules. Right into the ground.

No change, no gain. No gain, no pain. A small promotion is about the best you can get, and failure restores quiet, enduring balance to a bureaucrat's life. A few dollars more a month from a promotion seems like a positive incentive but it's really more of a threat. You have to work harder to keep up appearances, so maybe it's not a good thing to get. And you still have to show up every day for decades until they finally have to turn you loose. No matter who you are, how good you are, if you play in this system you weather down to the same level as everyone else. You want only to get through today, and live long enough to retire. Nothing more. Trying to actually do something only causes confusion and pain.

I was a member of two different Meetup groups based around web technology. This was years ago, but both failed. At the second one, there were 71 members and only nine or 10 ever showed up at meetings. The two organizers did the presentations and the rest sat there. People kept joining. And not showing up.

So easy. So clean.

I sort of know a web developer who lost his job when the big bust came a few years back, in the times following year 2000, after the world didn't end but other things had to, so... His name was Henry Shires. In 1999 he hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, using a shelter that he designed and made himself. He did it because he wanted to. He didn't sit around waiting for someone to ask, or to give orders. He needed to do the hike for personal reasons, so he went and did it. To help him do it, he designed a shelter that was sort of like a tent and sort of like just a tarp.

Later he got into web development. I don't know much about this part of his story, but having talked to him a time or two I heard that he lost his job. It was bad all over then. Happened to lots.

Sometime later, after he'd posted his original tarptent plans, then updated them with a new model or two (all free information for the taking), I found that he was in business. Making and selling tarptents.

Now he's one of the big names in the ultralight cottage industry class. Sounds like damning with faint praise but it's really praising with no damns at all. This is tough work, in a small, low-margin, highly-competitive market, and now he has a worldwide clientele and a reputation to go with it.

This is what personal responsibility is about.

First Henry had a dream, to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. And then he went and did it.

Then he had a job, and then he didn't.

Then he created a business and made it work.

This is real web development. Henry Shires had a stake in it. He had something to gain. Web development is no longer just something for his resume. It is a vehicle for his business. He had a reason to work with that, which was to develop his business, because he liked hiking and liked tarptents. So he took on the responsibility of it all. It gave him a payback. Not like what you get when you decide to become a member of an anonymous "Show up or not. Meh." group.

Not a big story at all, but nice. A nice story. Not like clicking a link on a web page and joining a group and never showing up. First Henry showed up at life and then the world joined him, with money in their hands.

Now if only I could be so smart.

Refs:
Tarptent.com
The original Tarptent

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? I've never done it that way, I swear!

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Good, Goodest, Or Goodenough?

Bruce Mau's "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" lists 43 items.

Number two is "Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

In other words, if I may paraphrase, excellence is not guaranteed by consensus. Results are not even guaranteed by consensus. Working toward consensus may lead only to deadlock.

Take a post by primo web designer Douglas Bowman. In "Goodbye, Google", part one, he tells of his resignation, and of some reasons why. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

Sounds like a good reason to leave, even for Twitter, which is where he went.

Some things cannot be decided by committee no matter how much time is put in.

In my own life I've seen a clear example of this.

First I lived in a state capital, where I was closely involved with a bicycling club. At that time my life was mainly bicycling. Day, night, weekends, and holidays. I lived for three years without a car.

When something needed doing, the club talked about it and then appointed a committee to study it.

I moved to another city, one not associated with government. I drifted into the bike club there to have some human contact, and although I was not a member, and not involved in running the organization as I had been in the first city, I noticed a difference.

It was obvious.

In this second place, when the bicycle club had an issue to confront, they'd discuss it for a few minutes, and then someone would say "I'll handle it." And it was done, and it was good. And it was settled.

True. This is different from creating a design for something, but the idea transfers.

Bruce Mau Design uses the power and promise of design to create an ethical sustainable future for our studio, our employees, our clients, our community and the world in which we live; for us, it is not about the world of design, but the design of the world.

It's like speech. Free speech. Which everyone is for until it is exercised.

Free speech is what no one wants to hear, but must hear. If you aren't offended or upset or opposed to what words muss your hair and run through your ears, then you aren't in the free speech zone. Free speech is what you don't want to hear, not what you agree with.

The same goes for "acceptable", "good", "excellent", and "Oh my effin god!!!!".

Committees do not surprise. They stupefy.

Keep thinking this: "Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

It might even hurt, but it's worth it.

 

Refs:
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
alt Mau link
Goodbye, Google
alt Bowman link

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Not as smart as you think you are.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Personal, Personal, Personal

Communication. It's an art. It's necessary. It's easy. It's hard. It depends.

You can't escape communication, and you don't want to. You need it, I need it, every person needs it, every business needs it. It's really all we have. But it can kill you if you turn your back on it.

One thing you can do is to keep it personal. Make all conversations unique. Own them. Act as though you mean it, and do. In fact, this is what you have to do. Otherwise you lose people.

It always takes at least two to talk, and to talk you need something to say, and you need trust, and a common goal. And you need to work at it.

Bad communication is easy. Just don't try. Mumble. Treat people like you don't care, which you don't, if bad communication is your goal.

Bad communication is avoidable communication. It's avoidable contact. It's avoidance in every way possible. Don't talk, don't write, don't answer the phone. Skip eye contact. Drone. Never smile. Join the undead. Escape reality. Escape involvement. Escape context. Escape business. Be vague. Be forgettable.

Bad communication is pointless communication. It never stands its ground, or gains any. Say something today and something else tomorrow. Forget. Make random noises with your mouth, put random words into your ads, build a random web site. It doesn't matter. Whatever.

Make no sense. Equivocate. Break promises. Represent nothing. Claim you didn't mean it. Concede the high ground. Keep at it until you are all alone. That's your measure of success.

Bad communication is simple communication. It's so simple that you don't need to think about it at all, ever. It's really that simple. You never need to worry about what you say or do because it doesn't matter. You can do anything. Or do nothing. OK either way.

If you want to communicate poorly then you don't work at it. Who wants work? Not you. You want to keep it simple. As simple as possible. Simpler.

No need to make sure you're being understood. Or make sure that you have understood. Or that you're making sense. Sounds like a plan, which may be a sign of too much work. Why bother? Try less, less hard, less often. Give up.

Bad communication fits all sizes. No tailoring a message to the audience. Stock phrases work great. After all, who cares anyway? Too much like work. Didn't we already cover that work thing?

Remember that you're going for the steady state of zero communication, zero contact, zero activity, zero complexity, zero gain. So don't bother checking who you're talking to or about what. Make something up. Anything. It will do.

Then, once you've learned this easy technique, keep it handy. Pull it out for any and all occasions. Why worry about who you're talking to? They're only people, and people are people. All the same. Numbers. If they don't like you they can go somewhere else.

It's not as though you want to have a relationship with anyone. Or like, care. Any place, any time, any people — doesn't matter. Bad communication works on all of them.

On the other hand you might consider another point of view.

• That no matter what you do, you are communicating something. You can't avoid it.
• That whomever you are dealing with will remember what you said and expect you to stand by it.
• That communicating takes work, and thought, and perseverance, and integrity.
• That if you want customers, you have to treat them with respect, as unique individuals with unique problems to solve.

So then, do you expect your web site to communicate well or not?

If not, then why have a web site?

But if you have a web site, why not have a great web site?

Remember, you can throw a few dollars at a wall and get nothing more than flying shadows. A good site doesn't cost much more than a bad one, and you get a relationship at no extra cost. A solid communicating relationship with someone you can trust, who does good work, and who will help you gain and hold business rather than losing it.

Because the downside of bad communication isn't simply gaining less. It's losing what you already have.

Or was that what you wanted?

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Still trying to make sense.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Different/Difference

Make Me Different. Make A Difference.

Say you have an idea. A big idea. A really, really big idea.

Cool, so who cares?

Size does not matter, potency does.

Your idea does not matter unless it matters. That's all that matters.

It gets easier when you ignore everyone else. Things get quieter. Like in your head. And then things can happen. You got that message before. Maybe it's sunk in by now. Hope so.

When you chase around, biting at flies, if you are successful you get to eat a fly for lunch. Chasing ideas is like that too. There are lots of bad ones around and you really don't want to catch any of them.

When you have a fixed idea about ideas, you are fixed. The way your neighbor's dog is fixed. Which is fine if that is your goal, but maybe not. Usually, when you have fixed ideas you are fixated on someone else's idea that happens to be stuck in your head.

And once it is, once it is stuck in your head, that alien idea, stuck there, then you have a problem.

It's like a piece of spinach stuck in your teeth, but in a good way. A good way because it's a good idea. (You aren't dumb enough to chase a dumb idea. Duh? No.) You chase good ideas. But it puts you in a bad way too because that idea is already taken. You can only borrow it, at best. Or steal it and pretend you didn't.

But it's already used.

If you borrow an idea you can't make it your own. And a borrowed idea isn't new. Not fresh. Not so interesting. You will wow no one. Fact of nature. Game over.

You can't start the race after it's over. Doesn't work. All you get is a view of horse butts.

So you lose.

This is good.

Nothing succeeds like failure.

Failure is the world's way of freshening up. Once you know you are a failure you have nothing left to lose. You already know what does not work, so you are way ahead.

You have a freshly-fertilized garden, but freshly-failed, and no one is expecting flowers from it, so you are A-OK, ready to go, cleared for liftoff, in a position to wow.

Someone else's idea is not yours. Someone else's game is not yours. So you reset the system, and you get to start over, with rules that you yourself make up. Because you are a failure, and because you have tried to copy success, and have played by the rules, and have had that gold ring on your mind for quite a while, and lost out, you are desperate.

Or were. Once.

Recently, in fact, but that didn't work, so you give up. You gave up.

So now you just play around at something, and that is when it can happen. Not always. No guarantee, but it can.

What can happen? What it is it?

Something new. Something unique. Something yours. Something that can change the world, or at least a part of

it. Something you are in control of. Something real.

Real. Really real.

Focus on that.

Focusing on the real makes it real.

And also, that which impresses may be big, and entertaining, but not always valuable.

That which speaks in a small voice may only be a random squeak, or it may be something valuable, and true. It may be something that has come to you and you alone for love and nurturing, because you were ready for it. Something that whispers truth and can change the world.

But you have to be there, and be open, and be honest, and be willing. Copying is not allowed.

If you are true to yourself at least you are true. You can't fake true, and people notice.

People like true. They will help you to be true, and to make more true, and to spread true around, and to become true like you.

Big ideas are always true at their core, and always start small, with the true part. Small is easier. Easier to understand, to make, to spread, to sell, to share, to appreciate.

Big comes later, but true comes first.

True is unique and different and honest, and wants a good home. And is always true. It is different from everything else and so makes a difference.

It will make you different and make a difference for you.

Which is what you want in creativity.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Still wondering.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals