paleo

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I visited my family for the holiday season and one the flight over the air plane company I flew with ended up turning what was expected to be a short layover of an hour into a seven hour ordeal of waiting, excuses, and ultimately poor service. Now some latitude can be given because its the holiday season so there’s more travel than usual and this can effect things badly, but when excuses keep piling up and activity doesn’t seem to be occurring, people get angrier and angrier.

Certainly the people I was waiting with got more and more frustrated as all of us were told that it was a mechanical issue, then an issue of getting paper work signed off on, and then the mechanical issue again, until finally we were directed to another plane and flown to our destination. I remember one of the people asking the stewardess of the plan if they were going to give us anything nice like a free snack or alcoholic drink for the delay and was told no. Would it have cost the airline some money to give out a free snack or alcoholic drink? Probably some, but when we compare that with the customer dissatisfaction and the propensity of those people to tell their relatives and friends, that cost is small in comparison to the loss of customers. One of the people came up with a pithy phrase using the company’s name and while we laughed, I couldn’t help but wonder how that phrase could come back to haunt that company.

Customer service sometimes has to become customer repair, where a business makes the extra effort to make up for the mistakes that occur, in order to repair the relationship with the customers. This isn’t the ideal situation and the reality is that the customer will remember that their trust was damaged. But when customer repair occurs, it shows the customer that the business is aware of the mistakes and is willing to do what is possible to repair the damage.

When a business doesn’t engage in customer service or customer repair, the likelihood of retaining the customer sharply decreases and can ultimately hurt the business. A business is only as good as its reputation with its customers and when those customers are upset they want to be heard. If the business won’t listen, they’ll find someone who will, whether it’s in person or on social media sites.

What do all of you think?

Book #99 -- Elizabeth Beckwith, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation, 236 pages.

This wonderful book walks new parents through the steps involved in the long-successful childraising technique known as the "Guilt and Manipulation Technique." I, myself, was raised with this highly effective technique, as was my mother before me, and her mother too. Beckwith spells out in plain language what generations of Catholic mothers have done instinctively for years. Thus, by reading Beckwith's book, the non-Catholic mother can also benefit from this wonderful program. Beckwith provides clear instructions, illustrative anecdotes from her own childhood, and discussion questions to help you get started.

(yes, there's snark here)

Progress toward goals: 364/365 = 99.726%

Books: 99/100 = 99.0%

Pages: 24743/25000 = 99.0%

2009 Book List

cross-posted to 15000pages, 50bookchallenge, and gwynraven

Movies first:

"Sherlock Holmes" is a hoot. People tend to forget that Doyle's Holmes really WAS a superhero (even though most of the action was off stage in Doyle's stories), and this silly but wonderful movie brings that back full force. It is just FUN.

"Up in the Air" is one of those movies that can be saved by an emergency phone call (in the manner of "Brazil" or "Pay it Forward"). That is, if you have to leave the theater about 15 minutes before the movie ends, you will like come away with the impression that it was a good movie, and you will remember liking what you saw. Unfortunately, if you watch the thing to the end, you will be depressed and wish you had watched something else. George Clooney is wonderful, and the movie has a daffiness that is charming right up until everything falls apart.

The holiday... I worked, of course. Dementia and I had our usual quiet celebration. The star of the day was Dementia's latest secret project, a hyena sock puppet. While "Scam" is not quite as magical as Rook the Sock Gnoll from two years ago, it was still pretty special, and a lot of fun. I have been hauling him around and showing him off to random acquaintances, who would no doubt question my sanity if that boat had not already sailed.

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/jjourdemayne/scam01.jpg

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u98/jjourdemayne/scam02.jpg

On the 26th, there was a family gathering at Brother Pete's house in Tinley Park, with 13 of the 15 members of clan there. My mother is past awareness of holidays, and niece Beth was off in Spokane accepting a marriage proposal. There was good pizza, and it was, for the most part, a very good time.

The one wrong note in the day was the fact that two of my relatives separately asked Dementia how her job search was going. She shrugged and changed the subject, and then came apart some time later on the drive home. At this point, this kind of question is emotionally equivalent to asking a terminal cancer patient if he is still dying. If there is good news, we will tell you. Otherwise, PLEASE don't ask.

Uncle Hyena

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paleo sent Lupa a few books, including one called Witchcraft Goes Mainstream, by a Brooks Alexander. In said book he quoted from an essay I wrote for New Witch called Invoking Buffy. The very first article I wrote actually. Now the author is an evangelical Christian so you can probably guess what the theme of his book is, and why my article is quoted is because he's dealing with a section on pop culture magic and how magic is becoming mainstream.

According to this author my approach is utter nonsense, make believe, pretend nonsense, or at worst dangerous deluded nonsense. He does get that what I wrote is a technique based approach to working with pop culture entities, but he attempts to argue that there's nothing remotely spiritual about it.

My thought is that its no less spiritual than believing in an invisible, egotistical bully who commands that you love him or suffer the consequences. And at least there is a much more developed mechanism of personal empowerment at work with the process the article describes.

In the end, I feel pretty amused and honored in a weird kind of way that my work got cited in an evangelical Christian Text (even if he did get my last name wrong and that's partially New Witch's fault). I don't agree with his points and I doubt he's read or heard of Chaos magic, or really demonstrates an understanding of the occult subculture. But it is amusing that my work showed up in an evangelical text. Go me!!

I was playing Space Hulk tonight with cobaltie...We are very amused. The words Zergling Rush and infected Terran came up. I particularly enjoyed his use of a dead space marine figure to illustrate the latter. We both had a lot of fun...ended up being a very close match. I'm already starting to think of how I can turn this into a more than two player game. I figure I can get it up to four players, with 3 players as marines and the other player as the alien, with a multi-level ship, or just a honking one level big ship, with marines starting at different sections.

May memories not be forgot
And never leave our minds
May no one tamper with our thoughts
For the sake of open eyes

For open eyes my dear
For open eyes
We will not drink to blindness dear
We'll drink to open eyes!

The mindless cretins on parade
They may fill our lives with fear
Should we forgive and look away?
Well perhaps, but not this year!

For open eyes my dear
For open eyes
We will not drink to blindness dear
We'll drink to open eyes

Our enemies may come on strong
They may try to break our will
We'll drink a toast to their good health
Just before we spring to kill!

For open eyes my dear
For open eyes
We will not drink to blindness dear
We'll drink to open eyes

So, Christmas is now over and done. I had a wonderful time with my family and a few good friends. Though it rained like crazy on Christmas, we got some nice snowfall afterward and it got very pretty and white, like the north should be over the holidays. Thanks to some nifty people in tc and a little help from my folks (thank you!!!) I finally replaced the faulty maf/temp sensor on the Mazda and gotbsome new tires thrown on, so now my girl is running like she is brand new.

Which is good, since I drove her about 500 miles to columbus Ohio today. The weather was good and I got a nice early start. My first stop was in Saginaw Michigan at a roller skating rink to pick up a craigslist purchase there for a friend since I was passing through anyway and drive it down to Ohio for him. The sum total of information I had was the address and the knowledge that the contact person wasn't there, but their mom was and would handle the sale.

Well, I show up around noon. No one is there. It's a little odd being at a skating rink period, much less one that is closes and in it's huge vacant lot. But I'm in no rush, I get to chatting on my phone and wait awhile. 15 minutes later, hark!! A car pulls up!! It's the daughter. She doesn't know anything about this sale, but knows about the left over ammusement item they have in back and let's me in out of the cold, saying that the mom will be in soon. I thank her and wait awkwardly while she opens for another 15 minutes. The mother shows up. Great!! Now I can get rolling!! But... Wait. She doesn't know about the sale either, and she is really suspicious of me.

She calls someone else who works there, but they know nothing either. They decide that, if the guy selling the thing can be contacted on the phone, then fine, they will let me pick it up for my friend. So they call Him. And call him. And call him. Nothing. He's on vacation and may be on a plane. I am beside myself. Well, she isn't even sure if she can run the cc machine. It's just getting better and better as the floodgates open and they have a crazy Wednesday and I am surrounded by kids putting on roller skates. I. Hate. Roller rinks. Don't ask. Anyway, we continue to wait for a call, and to her credit, every break in business the gal was on the phone calling like crazy.

Alas, at 2 pm we were losing hope and I still had 5 hours of driving left, so I drove off empty handed after all that work, feeling really bad for my friend. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful. I realized a song I had been listening to for quite sometime was actually by a band I thought I had just recently been getting into (yay shpongle) and I spent most of the drive thorough backwoods Ohio deafening myself with my crappy stock Mazda-Bose stereo. It did well enough.

Looking forward to seeing lots of cool folk down here in Ohio. Thanks so much to the Columbus crew for having me and my mutt, who is flying in tomorrow afternoon. Happy new year to you all, I hope it's a great one for you!! <3

Anybody know where a white chick from suburbia who happens to not live far below the poverty line may get a scholarship?

Fastwebs is useless, but I don't know of any other reliable site. College I'm transferring to is useless cuz I'm a transfer. Only offers scholarships to freshmen.

Whatever. If worst comes to worse, I'll just suck up the bs for a few more years and work full-time at Jewel for a while to pay off loans.

Dear gods I better get some loans from the bank. I have no other tolerable option.

I had to trim my bangs today, as they kept poking me in the eyes. I got a little...overenthusiastic. Thank gods hair grows quickly...

BEHIND YOU!!!! NARWHAL!!!


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jury duty is done. I'll grocery shop, and then do a bit of work stuff and likely spend the evening holed up in my nice comfy home or next door playing games such as dragons age origin or space hulk, cause I don't want to do anything too thought process oriented until I get caught up on sleep.

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I hear about return on investment quite a lot when it comes to social media. Businesses want to know what the return on investment is for using social media, but it’s a hard question to answer if they haven’t even invested the time or effort, the investment, in social media. And of course they may ask, “We;ll tell us how other businesses have done?” It’s a good question to ask, but ultimately looking at how other businesses performs using social media can only reveal so much, especially when the reality of social media is based in large part on the relationships you build with the people you are interacting with.

The ROI happens when you invest and you’ve spent some time actually using social media consistently. If you use it inconsistently the ROI will actually be inconsistent as well. This is true not just for social media, but business in general. You don’t get a return unless you are willing to invest and then then the return you get is usually measureable to the investment you put in.

ROI is bottom line thinking. And yes businesses need to think of the bottom line. But they also need to recognize that to get to the bottom line actions need to occur, processes need to happen, and relationships need to be built. Without all of that, no bottom line can be achieved…or rather the bottom line will be in the red.

Don’t just think of the bottom line. Think of everything that has to occur to get to the bottom line. Think of the process, the actions, the details, how you will get to that bottom line. If you want a specific bottom line think of what you need to invest to get there. Return can only happen when you’ve planned out what you will do to get that return! This applies to all areas of business, and it also applies to social media

I finally updated my DeviantArt account.

Plus, The Relic Hound finally has it's own fan page on FaceBook, which you can find here, if I copied it correctly.

Note, I'll only be using FaceBook to update the fan page, I probably won't be using it for anything else. If you want to know what's going on with my life, read this journal or email me--assuming you're someone who is privvy to that information.

Otherwise, I think these will be handy tools for networking and getting my stuff out. Thanks to those who have suggested, and helped me out so far.

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling from The Oatmeal.

Mardi Gras 2010 Parade Schedule

The Weird Book Room at Abebooks -- I am cracking up at titles such as, "The English: Are They Human?"

I forgot to mention that I revamped the Ravenari art-blog, and am now posting selected artworks and commentaries there; the commentaries are not duplicated at LJ.

Link to the RSS for those who subscribe through Bloglines and so forth.

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I just came back from seeing Alien Pocahontas on Planet Fern Gully and I have to say the effects are amazing - but it tended to hurt my eyes in bit and seemed choppy in fast moving sections which could have been due to wearing the 3-d glasses over my glasses and it not working that well.

( Possible Spoilers )

3.4/10

Well today has mostly been a bust I slept a lot and I've been loafing around accomplishing mostly nothing but then again considering the past couple of weeks I need this.

There are a lot of comments and emails I need to reply to that I'll get today or tomorrow.

I'm considering trying to see Avatar tonight at the AMC at 8:50 tonight... I hope it will be worth it.

Also Prototype This! has a bit on Blimp/Robotic Pizza Delivery systems and it's making me hungry I think I'll cook one up.