Follow the Bouncing E-mail

My daughters have been complaining about not receiving my e-mail attachments. Now, they tell me they are not even receiving my e-mails. They have a lot of company. My e-mails are bouncing back faster than I can hit “send” — well, my emails to anyone@charter.net, anyway. I had no idea how many people are on Charter. This is not good.

Nothing that involves the Internet is easy. It always has multiple steps, and this is no exception. I start by calling Charter, who tells me, “It’s not our fault. If your e-mail comes from your website, you will have to call your website host.” My website host says they can’t find anything wrong on their end; I should call Charter again. This gives me an instant stomachache.

Being technologically advanced, Charter has a female computer that tries to read my voice by asking me ridiculous questions to which there are no correct answers. Eventually, I give up and say “representative.” Wrong word. How about “operator”? Still wrong. “Agent?” Bingo.

Next step: the endless wait. Despite the fact that my call is important to them, I go into a loop that plays endless commercials for Charter, until a human being finally shows up and asks me for my PIN, which I don’t know. Somehow, he accepts one of the numbers I give him and tries to identify my problem. The agent gives up, says he will connect me with a supervisor, and puts me on perma-hold. The supervisor does not appear. Eventually, I am cut off.

This goes on for a while until I have a tantrum and actually get to speak to a real, live supervisor. I try to explain that all of my e-mails are coming back with an error message that indicates I’m sending SPAM. He suggests I forward the offending message (which one?) to postmaster@charter.net. "How can I do that if I can’t get through to Charter?" I ask. He prevails upon me to try. My e-mail bounces back. He gives me his private e-mail address and finally deduces that Charter doesn’t like my e-mail signature with its little ghost and links to my website, blogs, and twitter.

"Do my daughters really need my signature?" he asks. "Can I write the postmaster@charter.net from another e-mail address?" These suggestions are followed by a serious explanation of SPAM with which I am quite familiar, since a lot of it gets through, although, of course, not my little ghost logo or twitter link.

That whole procedure (four phone calls) takes over an hour, and I still haven’t begun to implement the supervisor’s multiple solutions. At the moment, I am too tired to even try. I only hope no one from Charter is expecting a reply to his or her e-mail message before tomorrow, or, perhaps, ever.

What to do when you hit a wall

I’m propped up in bed with my computer on my lap. This is my favorite writing spot, even though my office is only about six feet away. I am ready to go, eager to get started on the morning’s project. Unfortunately, my mind is not. It seems to be unwilling to focus. What is the project? it asks, without enthusiasm. No part of me is able to remember what I was going to do. Other essential contributors check out, as well. My eyelids suddenly feel heavy. My back rebels against sagging pillow behind me. I look down and my fingers are on the wrong keys. Apparently, I am in the midst of a mutiny.

OK. I won’t write; I’ll read. I click on Safari to take me The Huffington Post. It refuses. My wireless connection doesn’t like this room and fights with me every time I walk two feet from my office. I could try to check my e-mail, but that feels daunting at the moment. Besides, the wireless probably won’t let me. So, now what?

I’m about to panic. My mental to-do list is as long as my arm, if only I could bring it to the surface. I start to type — anything — just to get started. My hands are in full rebellion now. Every other word is inside out. The last straw is mush brain, more officially known as “fibro fog.” I stare at the computer for a while (I have no idea how long) and face the facts. My systems have shut down. They are on strike.

Should I analyze the possible causes? Fight through this and try to write anyway? (I am trying, and believe, me, this is not going well.) Years ago, I read that the body never lies. I have had ample evidence that this is so. Mine is sure telling me the unvarnished truth. Your circuits are on overload! Cool it.”

“Do you ever have writers block?” my students ask me.

“Sure,” I say. “Everyone hits a wall every once in a while.”

“What do you do?” They want to know.

“I get up and walk away,” I tell them. And that is exactly what I am going to do.

Is it Mac, or is it me?

It’s not easy being a Mac person. First of all, despite all protestations to the contrary, it’s pretty hard to communicate with the PC world. And let’s face it, the world is PC. Second, every time something goes wrong, the smug PC person on the other end will automatically blame Mac. After all, what else could it be? But it’s the third reason that is driving me to distraction this morning.

Mac is innovative to the point of overwhelm. Every day there seems to be a new product, a new process, a new way to do something that was introduced only two days before. I never seem to catch up. Despite being a loyal member and regular attendee of One to One, Mac’s individualized training program for Mac users (only $99 a year), most of the time, I’m in a fog. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it a cloud, because that is actually the newest Mac creation.

When I signed up for a program called MobileMe (only $99 a year), my trainer, in a rush of words, informed me of all its wonderful features: another e-mail address; syncing capabilities with my other Mac (which has the old version of MobileMe, called .Mac); the ability to share large files and photos through my public folder; and, best of all, “the cloud.” The cloud is where I would back up all my important files that can then be downloaded to either of my computers. Here’s something no one mentioned: When I change a file on one Mac, it will automatically sync with the other one. That took a near nervous breakdown on my part to figure out.

MobileMe has many wonderful features I haven’t yet discovered. If I had actually followed my Mac trainer’s explanation of how to find all the interesting help topics on the MobileMe website it would have speeded up the learning curve, I’m sure.

“I showed you that,” he said. “You did?” I replied, suspecting early dementia. He was politely adamant; I was embarrassed. I remember him going over something I didn’t quite get, and the MobileMe videos and mini-manuals must have been what it was.

So, here I sit, enmeshed in MobileMe icons, MobileMe videos, and notes from my last MobileMe training session, trying to figure out which icon will take me where I want to go and how to password protect my public folder. If you know, please give me a hint. I would so appreciate it!

Mac User from Hell

The mother of all storms blew through St. Louis yesterday. It knocked down power lines, closed highways, left whole blocks dark, and interrupted my Internet access. You would think I would have figured out when my electricity went off that, perhaps, just perhaps, when I rebooted and couldn’t connect to my website, e-mail, or iDisk (my cyber backup system up there in the Apple’s private cloud), that it might have had something do with cable being knocked out by the storm. I believe the appropriate word here is Duh!

But, no; I just went crazy unplugging and replugging little black boxes, running around the Apple/MobileMe website to no avail (you can only get there on Safari, not on Firefox), and calling every Apple tech supportnumber on my list. Thank God, these guys are all hired for their patience because I am the Mac user from hell. Everything that goes wrong pitches me into panic mode. Ohmygod, __________ isn’t working. I think I’ll go ballistic. (Should one confess to such things on her blog? Well, I’m probably not alone in this form of insanity.)

The more little gadgets and capabilities I own, the worse it gets. Once upon a time, I had a little box called a Mac SE, which gave way to ever bigger boxes and then back down in size to just a monitor and then to even smaller MacBooks. The littlest Macs are iPhones and iTouch/iPods, but I haven’t gone there yet. There’s no telling what could go wrong with something I can hold in my hand.

So, after much teeth gnashing and nail biting, my cable is back up, my Internet connections are working, my junk mail box is full again, and my iDisk is back in its cloud. What more could one ask, except maybe for the sun to shine on a weekend, since it is June; and, at this rate, I will never get a tan. But I digress.

Really, at the moment, until the next storm, it’s all good.

What to Do When Your Hard Drive Dies

Like so many things you don't want to think about, having your hard drive crash is probably high on your list. You may know someone who lost everything (so to speak) and ever after became a nut about backing up files in six different places. But, until it happens to you, you just don’t believe it ever will. Then, one day for no discernible reason, you turn on your computer, and nothing happens. Nada. No familiar whir of start-up sounds. No sudden appearance of your overcrowded desktop. Just plain nothing.

You reboot and wait. Same nothing. Uh oh. You have a problem. Just how big a problem depends on several factors. If this is your only computer, it’s big. If you didn’t back up everything on it before it crashed, it’s huge. If you don’t have an extended warranty policy, like AppleCare for Macs, it’s expensive. At the very least, it’s annoying, frustrating, and time consuming.

I have personally experienced all of the above scenarios and the emotions they engender. The panic attack that follows a hard drive crash is indescribable, as is the feeling of relief when the computer EMT restores my data long enough to move it to another computer while my original hard drive slips into oblivion.

Even under the best of circumstance (that’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one), the whole affair is a pain in the neck. It just happened again, so I know. My laptop hard drive died. I took it to the Apple store. “Yup, it’s dead,” the guy at the genius bar told me. I whipped out my AppleCare box, which seemed to suffice. “OK,” he said. “Give me an hour, maybe less.” It turned out to be less. “Here’s what you do,” he instructed. "Plug your fire wire into both computers. Restart the source computer. Go do something else for a while. Everything from your desktop will load onto your laptop.” And it all came to pass, just as foretold.

Fantastic — except for figuring out how to reset the wireless access to the Internet, the missing latest versions of software that had been on the laptop but not the desktop, and anything else I didn’t know was the only file for something irreplaceable. Much hair pulling and expressive mumbling later, I think I am functioning again.

OK, here’s the advice part: Back up. Back up. Back up. Not too original, but worth repeating. Back up to a separate external hard drive. Back up from one computer to another (if you have two). Back up to iDisk (otherwise known as the Cloud), if you have a Mac. Back up to some other cyber storage place if you have a PC. Think of it this way: If your hard drive crashes, you have all that stuff somewhere else. If you house burns down (God forbid), you still have all that stuff, except that now it’s up there, somewhere in space.

Final words. Back up every day!

Wearing My “Entrepreneur” Hat

Let’s say I’m comfortable with two of my three hats as a small business owner: technician and manager. After all these years, I have a pretty firm hold on the creative side of my business. I love writing, editing, coaching, and teaching; and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at them. While my least favorite hat is that of manager, if I’m going to stay in business, I have to wear it and master all that it implies. I continue to work hard on getting that hat to fit. That leaves Hat #3 — entrepreneur.

David E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, describes the entrepreneur as the visionary, the dreamer, and the catalyst for change. In other words, this is the part of us that grows our businesses and sees opportunities. That sounds great, but what does it mean? Well, the “growing the business” part is fairly straightforward. When I’m finished with the project I’m working on, if I haven’t filled the pipeline, I won’t have another project to do. Of course, there is always the element of luck or fate or whatever makes the phone ring when I haven’t done a thing to make it ring.

That happened a lot in the beginning, and I never really knew why. Someone would call and offer me a freelance opportunity. The good news was I had lots of work; the bad news was I didn’t understand what it took to find that work. The magic word was marketing, which, to me, was mysterious and scary.

Like so many small business owners, I muddled through for years until I met a marketing expert who sat me down and taught me the basics … and I mean basics. My friend and marketing guru, Bobette Kyle, has years of experience and a master’s degree in marketing. If she talked nonstop for a year, she couldn’t begin to tell me what she knows; but she has told me enough to make me downright happy to wear my entrepreneur hat. What I once approached with trepidation, I now enjoy and look forward to doing.

What about the “seeing opportunities” part? I would also describe that as the ability to reinvent oneself when necessary. I’ve had to do that many times in the past two decades. When I first started freelancing, I wrote a great many articles for corporate publications. That was an extension of what I had been doing for years and probably would have continued doing if all those corporate magazines and newsletters in St. Louis hadn’t ceased publication. OK, if I didn’t write articles, what would I do? Well, if I put on my entrepreneur hat, I would ask myself what are the needs in the market? And what are the opportunities? The answers determine how I would reinvent myself this time.

If you don’t like change, this idea will not have much appeal. In that case, you aren’t going to like wearing the entrepreneur hat. Fortunately, that hat fits me very well these days.

Wearing My “Manager Hat”

I went into business for myself because I wanted to write and be my own boss. It was a long-time dream; the timing was right; and I was sooo ready. So, I took the plunge, having absolutely no idea what I was doing. That was a mistake. If I had it to do over again, I would know what I was doing before I found myself doing it.

Here are some of things I didn’t know:

• For every dollar that came in I had to put aside a certain percentage of for taxes. My accountant told me the amount could range from 30 to 50 percent, depending on my tax bracket. That meant for every three dollars I earned, I could spend two or possibly only one and a half. Those taxes had to be sent to the IRS every quarter before the fifteenth of the appropriate month.
• I already knew I was supposed to keep track of every expense, but I had no system for doing that. I either needed to create such a system or have my accountant do it. For years, I paid my accountant the extra money to do bookkeeping I could easily have done myself, if I had bothered to learn how.
• There was also, of course, the matter of tracking the time I spent on each client’s job and being sure I charged the correct amount. That meant deciding on an hourly rate, making sure the client knew what it was and agreed to pay it, buying and learning to use a time and billing program, and remembering to send invoices regularly and follow up when they weren’t paid. Every item on that list was its own individual nightmare.
• Then there were contracts, which I had no idea how to negotiate, write, or enforce. Consequently, there were holes in my contracts big enough to drive a jeep through. As for enforcing them — well, that was a joke. I tried Small Claims Court a few times before I found out it was an even bigger joke. (See Small Claims Court Revisited)
  
• Finally, there was the whole matter of determining whether or not I was making a profit and, if so, how much. To this day, I have no idea how to calculate that, so I never have.

The bottom line is this: I “went into business,” if you could call it that, like a kindergartner enrolling in college. I didn’t ask the right questions because I had no idea what questions to ask. I learned every lesson the hard way, often the very hard way. Some lessons I did not learn at all because, once again, I didn’t know there were lessons. Don’t ask me how; but, somehow, I have survived for 20 years. Much as I love what I do, though, managing the business has always been the toughest part for me.

What would I do differently if I could start over? In terms of wearing my manager’s hat, just about everything. The very first thing I would do is sign up for a small business course at the community college or one of the local universities. There are many such courses available, and I should have taken at least one. Learning to manage a one-person business is not like learning quantum physics. It doesn’t have to be the very hard way. It doesn’t have to be a mysterious or frightening. From what I hear, it could actually be challenging, growth promoting, profitable, and fun.

I have a little trouble with the fun part, but it’s possible, I guess.