Buyer Beware!

September 2007 Speaking of credit cards…another word to the wise: If your credit card fails to be read properly by the “I needed to be replaced a year ago” cash registers at Office Max, they WILL try to make an old fashioned carbonless imprint of your credit card to go along with all your other preprinted identity information on the receipt. When I objected to this archaic and long since unsafe practice of creating a copy of my WHOLE credit card number and storing it along side all my contact information, this making identity theft so inviting, they told me that they HAD to do that or I had to return my purchases.

After having called the manager to the front to speak to me, he told me that they not only have this information accessible to all their employees, but also snail mail these receipts to corporate for final processing and archiving.

Good grief! How many pairs of eyes would then be privy to anything anyone would want to know about me? Give me a break!

So having finally talked the manager of the east store into forgoing the needed imprint of my card, I got to rehearse again when this happened at the west store, not too many weeks later.

Okay, so the moral of the story is that the benefit of paying with cash and keeping your cash receipts for tax purposes becomes more and more inviting! Buyer Beware!

August 2007 Okay, so I haven’t seen it all. I admit it…there are a lot of things in this wide world that I have not seen yet, but I can at least trump the last thing that surprised me…the snail mailed, printed and pasted up work order of my previous blog.

I don’t know about you, but I guess I am “old school” enough myself, that I am getting sick and tired of doing my own checkout tasks everywhere I shop! Give me a break…we are now doing the work of all those employees that got fired due to downsizing and for the same price of the products we are buying. I am thinking we need to start a loud hue and cry to get a discount if we have to do our own bagging and checking out, right?

I was trying to check out at Office Depot the other day and I kept getting stuck in a frustrating loop on their credit card self-help machine. (By the way, if I need self help, I can think of a lot “funner” ways to get it.) So the young adolescent female who was standing there watching me struggle finally said with a smirk on her face, “Duh, you have to press the invisible button on the bottom left of the screen to check out!”

My comment – “Yes, I totally am ashamed that I forgot to turn on my mind reading abilities before I left for your store to spend money to make your paycheck come true, and your company wealthier! Well, duh!”

Believe it or not, the invisible button on the lower left of the screen did the trick and I was self-checked-out in no time at all. A word to the wise – if all else fails on a self check out machine, please DO find the invisible button and push it. It will make your life much easier!

I have seen it all now (oh, never say that, by the way)!

I have been in this business for over ten years…not since the inception of the Internet, of course, but pretty darn close to the beginning of the era of people paying other people to make their websites. Heck, I was in business when no one wanted a website for their business. I would do cold calling by walking into local businesses and ask them if I could interest them in this new cool tool for marketing, called a Web Site.

Some of their responses:

“I don’t have a bug problem, but thanks.”

“I already have an exterminator.”

“The internet will go the way of all fads…down the toilet.”

Well, now, thankfully every business (including some that really don’t need one) really want their own website. The days of talking people into their need for one are over! Yeah!

But are those same people, falling into line with the new era of digital work orders and email conversing?

Well, you decide, judging by the following story:

Recently, I was working with what I will term as an “old school” client that would prefer to do all the work by phone rather than by email. I mean we are talking, having me makes coding changes on the fly and upload them as we spoke so he could see then happen in real time. I was bearing up until the final revisions and tweaks to his new site, when we had a total communications break down. I was not aware that my request for final revisions be in “writing” would be taken literally. Failing to remember just how old school this client was, I received a manila envelope in the mail a week later (after his insisting that the changes be made “yesterday”), with a complete print out of the site, with red pen markings and paste ups of some image changes.

Wow, did I have a good laugh when I opened that envelope and saw what was inside! I can remember that happening a couple of times in the good old days of the Wild Wild Internet, but in 2007?

It just goes to show that you can never be too sure of the effect of your words and to be ever vigilant of the way you say things and the importance of acknowledging differing generations and the terminology that they understand in the way you deal with clients.