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I recently ordered and received my first batch of farm fresh veggies and fruits from Farm Fresh to You and its been an interesting couple of days biting into new wonderous things, what I thought was a potato is actually a lemon cucumber and I’ve never seen one of those before but its delicious it does take a little like a lemony cucumber. I had to go check out a site about cucumbers to figure out what I had, check it out here. I ordered the more mixed because I wanted a variety of items to start and to see how much I needed for a month’s supply of food. I’m trying out this concept of eating fresh and healthier. Although it has occured to me that I really don’t know how to cook certain things or what to do with them and I haven’t really ever used fresh herbs except occasionally, for example, what does one do with basil? I’m going to attempt basil ice cream, strangely enough that sounds delicious. So each month will be a discovery of new and exciting farm fresh veggies and fruits.
My neighbor comes over to tell me his best friend is being a bitch and acting like a child leaving him horrible vmails, this same person uses my fax machine for his own benefit – giving it to his lawyer to send him a fax, then he continues to talk for an hour about how my fresh produce from the farm delivery service is odd and doesn’t look fresh and he’ll no longer take the eggplant which he agreed to 2 days agao - geez, it’s not the same as going to whole foods were the wash and put out the pretty display of produce, its directly from the farm and how my quick pickup vacumn cleaner isn’t the best on the market or how his best friend ditched him 2 days before the concert and how he’s such a poor baby that he can’t get to the stupid concert now – lets try a scenario, every other person in the world that wants to go to a concert without a car will figure out how to get there (aka bart, caltrain, bus, walking, you name it- they will get there instead of acting like a stupid spoiled brat, they will figure out how to get there) The world does not revolve around a spoiled brat, most people shy away from it, I can’t ever seem to make him go away. Both him and his best friend – yea, there’s a reason their friends, both spoiled brats in adult bodies. whew..feel better now, thanks for listening
When’s the last time you moved? Did you do it yourself or haggle friends to help you out on the big day? And the boxes, where did you get them? Behind grocery stores if you were lucky, from work, from friends who had extras or office supply stores?
The last time I moved, I did all of the above. I rented the truck, got two friends to help, thank god, they brought their kids to help out, searched high and low for moving boxes which took days out of my time along with the days of prep time to pack the boxes before my friends arrived. Not to mention I had to wrangle all the cats into their carriers on the big moving day, get them moved first in one load, back to the first location to meet my friends to pack up the uhaul, my car, their cars because I didn’t get a big enough uhaul..whew, it was a long day but I made it into my first house with friends intact. In retrospect, it would have been so much easier to use upack, order the moving boxes and supplies that I needed before hand, upack has this handy estimator to estimate how many boxes you might need, what you think you might need in my experience, double it or buy an assortment of upack moving boxes kits. Upack is unique in that its a moving company that you pack up the truck and you unload the truck but they do all the driving between destinations. Yes, you have to plan for the move and order the truck but you have to do that anyways when getting a rental truck, arranging friends and family on your big day. You can also rent relocubes, portable storage containers that you lock up if you think its possible that your move might take a few days to get it together or the unpacking might take longer than a day. And the moving boxes and supplies, they will deliver them right to your front door in all kinds of assortments from kits for the kitchen, kits for the wardrobe, for a 1-2 bedroom apartment to 3+ bedroom home and included with their kits are all the supplies you need such as tape, dish protectors, divider pads, divider partitions, bubble wrap, things you would have to buy separately. If I ever move again, I’m calling Upack, you should too. Much to my surprise, not only is the other chiropractor gone but the whole office staff is gone replaced by a whole new staff. The new people that have no idea who the patients are or what the hell is going on with outlandish cover stories to what happened to the previous staff. You come to trust people and get to know them and then its like they never existed and you have to start over with a new group of people. Now its not the replacement people’s fault that the staff is gone but when you tell me you don’t ever plan to leave in a happy sing-song voice, trust me on this, I don’t believe you for a second, at some point your boss will get annoyed with you and you’ll never have existed and I’ll have to start over with a new staff that claims that will never leave in a happy sing-song voice.
Why do I say outlandish cover stories because I was told that the office assistant just graduated from vet school and took a new job. Well, since I know for a fact that she did not just graduate from vet school because she was at my graduate ceremony getting her degree in business administration, what the hell? Come to find out she did get another job at a vet office, in the field she wants to practice and gave her two weeks notice but the doc told her to just leave. Now I understand staff comes and goes but its the manner in which staff comes and goes that defines a practice. If each year, your staff is replaced with a new staff – then something is odd. If your staff is replaced monthly, something is wrong. Is it you perhaps? Your most valuable asset is your staff, happy employees don’t leave happy places to work. Employees don’t leave bad companies – they leave bad bosses and if your patients keep seeing different people come and go, even if its over the course of a couple of years, they will leave too because the vibe in the office seems different. Its no longer a happy stress-free place, its got internal turmoil usually at the helm. If you are a bad boss, not only do you employees feel stressed, your patients or clients can feel it too. Although I now understand where my weird vibe was coming from every single time I go into that office, it doesn’t work for me, it hasn’t really worked for since they moved to a bizarre location that’s a traffic nightmare, its time to move on. The health care insurance reform/act strikes again against small businesses, just when you think it couldn’t get any worse than mandating health insurance to people that don’t want it and penalizing them for not getting it, now its adding a burden to small businesses 1099 reporting requirements which I wonder what the hell has to do with health insurance (ah but that becomes clearer in a moment)
Starting in 2012, self-employed workers, small businesses, charities and government agencies will be required to issue Form 1099s to every vendor from which they purchase more than $600 in goods during the year. For example, a self-employed consultant who buys a $700 computer from an office supply store would be required to send a Form 1099 to the store and the IRS. Currently, businesses are required to provide Form 1099s for services, such as payments to independent contractors, but not for goods. The IRS failed their own audit, so what makes them think they can handle the additional burden of receiving 1099s for everything a small business purchases over 600.00 Apparently the provision in the health insurance act is designed to provide the IRS with more information about income and deductions reported by small businesses. Underreported income from small businesses accounts for a significant portion of the $300 billion “tax gap,” according to the IRS. The tax gap is the difference between the amount owed the government and the amount taxpayers actually pay. Its also designed to help offset some of the costs of health care reform. Lets get this straight >
> somehow that’s expected to help the small business? The IRS seems to think the requirement could force small-business owners and charities to purchase new software and hire additional accounting services. What I see that doing is small businesses are going to be purchasing less and/or small businesses are going to go out of business. When a small business is struggling to stay afloat in this economy, adding more tax requirements doesn’t really help the situation. And the IRS failed its own audit, why should we trust them to make decisions for us? If the tone at the top should be that the government knows how to follow their own accounting principles and procedural guidelines and the IRS can’t even figure out how to do that, when the the IRS fails to meet the standards of financial accountability and diligence that it imposes on the taxpayers and can no longer adequately police itself, why should it be trusted with the authority to police individual American businesses and taxpayers? I used to love google search engine because I could find virtually anything going back years when I did a google search and I still use it but I’m starting to love it less and less since they changed it to be more like Bing. Bing actually seems to bring up better results than google lately but still get alot of useless information that I don’t want or need and having to search through 20 pages to find old historical information isn’t helpful. Instead of bringing back useful info all of a sudden the results are returning crap. If I wanted to search for the most current items, then I would choose to search for everything that’s happened in the last 10 days. Google it wasn’t broken, why did you fix it?
I started using dogpile to search through the various search engine but dogpile scans through google and bing which brings back the useless crap that I don’t need or want to see. I want to be able to search by keywords and that seems to be missing in Google, Bing and even Dogpile now So how does one get rid of the useless search results and start finding the information that is needed in the cloud? I want to be able to type in keywords and get what I’m looking for and not have to be really specific in my word search, is that too much to ask? Well, you can still use google but go to http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all to use the original Google search engine or try Altavista.com http://www.altavista.com Yahoo.com http://www.yahoo.com/ Lycos.com http://search.lycos.com Search.com http://www.search.com (which still searches through Bing and Google but at least you get a little more definite keyword search results) There are all forms of security and what makes one person feel safe may not have any bearings on how another person feels. I’ve have felt completely safe in my house and my backyard because I’ve put up fences and gates that are locked and honestly thought between the ivy and rose bushes growing on one side and that locked gates that no one would attempt to get through the barriers. I felt completely safe leaving my back doors open while I took a shower or being in my backyard in general. I also have a kitty door in one of the gates and little dogs sometimes wander through as well, I’m a good neighbor, I’ll catch your little dog and bring it back to you.
But recently, one of my neighbors kids scaled the fence, rosebushes and all to come get their little dog that wandered off. These weren’t little kids, the youngest looked alot older than his 10 years and the older one looked like a full-grown man, they didn’t announced themselves, they slying came into my backyard and walked right into my house to get their little dog. Scared the crap out of me, two men in my backyard while I was standing there naked getting dressed. I didn’t know who they were, I had no defense. I was visibily shaken and when I went to tell my neighbor that her kids were in my backyard and in my house while I was naked, she smiled and said “oh, I told them to go back there and get the dog” – no real apology for scaring me. What if I had a gun? How come they didn’t announce themselves? How come they thought it was ok to come into my house? Who taught them their manners? The gates are locked for a reason. If I don’t answer the door, maybe I’m out back or in the shower but either way that does not give a neighbor the right to violate my privacy or my security. Now I can’t do anything illegal like putting wire or broken glass on the fences that would hurt anyone coming over because apparently my privacy rights aren’t legal if I hurt someone in their attempt to violate my rights. But I can put harmless fence spikes on top of the fences that won’t damage you but will hurt like hell. I wouldn’t want to hurt the animals anyways and I’m pretty sure the animals will just go through the kitty door. I’ve also learned a valuable lesson, my gates and fences are quite as secure as I thought they were and I need to bolt the gates from inside and also make the gate doors a little stronger. And my cell phone should always be within reach. Maybe my neighbor didn’t mean anything by it but why didn’t her kids say something when they were in the yard, why be all sneaky? Changing our name to elements write – words ignite, haven’t quite decided how this is going to work, sexymagick is still up and running but its time to move to a new phase in this blogs life, become a little more sophiscated. I think sexymagick will slowly be archived – closing that chapter of the blogs life, slim it down and start concentrating more on functional pieces of writing art and eventually converted to a new blog for elementswrite. Its a work in progress, don’t expect changes overnight, I don’t have time to ferret out 10 years worth of posts and figure out what can be closed and what shall remain. In the meantime, elementswrite.com is forwarded here as well as words-ignite.com, our twitter feed has been changed.
I’m a big fan of word of mouth advertising, its how I got most of my business. I’m kind of laid back, so I don’t go out there hustling people for business – well, I’ve actually tried that and it seems to have backfired, maybe because I was too honest – you’re website sucks probably wasn’t the best approach..lol but that’s not my point here. Word of mouth advertising is great, if someone thinks my services are spectular or great, they’re going to tell someone and then someone else.
I have to admit, sometimes I’m horrible about following up especially if you catch me off-guard and give me a phone number to call – kind of reminds of when I was an IT person and everyone would stop me in the hall to tell me their problem, at some point, you kind of start to tune them out or sometimes between me writing down a phone number and remembering where I put it or what piece of paper I wrote it on, I forget to do it and then I feel weird about calling someone I probably should have called 3 weeks ago (by now that person has found an accountant) But there is also negative word of mouth which just rubs me the wrong way, when you push the concept of selling yourself on people. I’ve said it before: making your clients work for you to get you work and constantly selling yourself must be exhausting and its a real buzz-kill. Would you want a slimy salesman harrassing you all the time? And if perhaps, that getting your customers to tell their friends by ramming it down their throats on a constant basis is your idea of advertising, what do I get out of telling my friends? For example, isn’t it great that you can come in anytime and get wellness care, tell your friends about us. Lets see I pay to come and get help anytime, I’m pretty sure you don’t see me for free and yes its great but stop being a car salesman, its kind of slimy. Another example if the form letters requesting you recommend at least 3 people that might benefit for your wonderful experience by sending the person requesting it their information. Kind of slimy in my opinion, I’m not giving out my friends and family’s personal information. If they’re interested in whatever I’ve been doing, they can read about it here and call themselves. I don’t give out personal information. Now on the other hand, sending out a word of mouth advertising email campaign is great, it gets all the people on your list (the key word here is “your list” of contacts) to know about something you’ve done or if you have a new merchandise etc. There are also other forms of word of mouth advertising beyond just service, its that special touch you do for a client, like come help them with their bills every month or an interesting slogan or name of a company, its about architectural, kinetic, generous means of advertising. Twitter is definetly a form of word of mouth advertising, get yourself on there and talk about something related to your business, get other people to follow you by being unique (and no, I don’t have a unique approach yet – working on it). A much better way to encourage your clients to spread the word is to have them write testitmonals for you, share their opinions on facebook or yelp. Do something extraordinary, give away things, you can always make up for it in your pricing structure, for example, every once in awhile, I have freebie Mondays (more or less, that means I probably forgot to write down how long I did something for you and you got that for advice or discussion for free). Write a thank you note to a client, tell them how wonderful they are just because, be geniune, treat your clients and vendors like you want to be treated. My chiropractor up and disappeared, ok so maybe I should qualify that, my main chiropractor, Dr. Stephanie is still there and considering its her practice, I doubt she’s closing up shop anytime soon but the second doctor working at the office up and disappeared – Dr John, he didn’t even say goodbye which kind of makes one wonder of the circumstances for him leaving. They said that his girlfriend got a job offer in Oregon and he moved with her but he couldn’t said goodbye to his patients? And it makes one wonder, is that just a cover story, is he really somewhere in town and they don’t want people leaving to go where he is?
What I really like about him and apparently a few other people feel the same way because they were talking in the waiting area was that he always had time to talk to you about any new issues or concerns, he wasn’t running from patient to patient and he didn’t always try to upsell you on services. He actually seem to care. I looked forward to my visits with him and it didn’t hurt that he was good-looking, had a geninue smile for everyone. I felt like I had gotten to know him a little, what his favorite band was, what his sense of humor was, what he liked to do in his spare time, the typing with one hand and eating doughnuts was an interesting fact about him (i know quirky but I like quirky and smart) …. and he really did seem to care, he always ask me how long it had been – trying to get me to quit smoking, how long since my last cigarette, or that he would love me no matter what, if I quit or not. I was actually looking forward to telling him I was on my way to quitting, going longer and longer without smoking, he said he would keep bugging me until I quit and now, he’s gone, so what does it matter really, who’s going to bug me and care that much? Maybe he was just my doctor but how often do you feel like your doctor actually cares and you’re not just a number or money to them? He always had time and treated you like you were the only person that matter at that moment he was doing the adjustment, not the 5 other people waiting for their turns. And he listened, if I said I was having a problem with a specific area, he checked it. I think Dr Stephanie cares about you but the upselling, seriously give it a break, can you just talk to me once without selling me your business model. I do not have any friends that would be interested, 90% of my friend have no idea where the hell Concord is nor do they live in the area, they’re not interested, stop trying to upsell your product. I know how great is it but I’m starting to wonder why all your assistant doctors leave, what is it about you, that makes them leave your practice? You had a great one before Dr. John but she left too. You start to feel a connection with someone and then poof, they are just gone with no goodbyes, like they never existed. And the newest one, he might be a great guy but I doubt I’ll let myself open up to him, he’ll be gone sooner or later. There’s a review on yelp that I actually agree with the car salesman pitch, sometimes it seems like its all about the money, the more patient you initially bring in, the more money you make, its not the wellness clients that bring in money, its the ones that need immediate care and can afford it. The wellness clients means you are doing something right and have gotten us out of pain but we don’t bring in the big bucks. I’m a small business just like you and I completely believe in word of mouth advertising but I don’t force it on my clients, if they think I’m spectacular, they will refer me. If they don’t, I suppose they wont and they won’t continue to see me either. Word of mouth is great but making your clients work for you to get you work – something seems a little odd about that, you’re not doing something right. Maybe you’re too busy to see that you have a great bunch of clients that keep coming back. Constantly selling yourself must be exhausting and its a real buzz-kill. So poof, he’s gone like he never existed. When I mentioned he had been helping me with my wrist issue, she ignored my comment about him and tried to upsell me on the wellness care and I should tell my friends, really? seriously? It almost makes one think, that he really didn’t care about anyone, how callous can someone be not saying goodbye, was it all an act? Which I don’t believe for a second but maybe he wasn’t allowed to say goodbye, which also makes me wonder why he left. I’m very sad, it sucks that he’s gone, you get to know someone for two years and then they’re gone (which honestly in my opinion, makes it hard to trust people and get to know them, if they just leave all the time) Poof, he never existed, all traces of him have just disappeared. |
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