As a kid, I got teased mercilessly for my prominent proboscis. I think I could probably recite all 20 nose jokes from Roxanne (Obvious: “Excuse me. Is that your nose or did a bus park on your face?” Humorous: ” Laugh and the world laughs with you. Sneeze and it’s good bye Seattle!”). It does have it’s advantages….I can smell the garlic fries at AT&T from Larkspur. There are a few other advantages, but those are known only to us members of the Holy Guild of Jimmy Durante. The other advantage of being nosey is it can lead you down paths you never would have found otherwise.
I have a personal rule that if someone sends me an email and it contains a website I’m not familiar with I look it up. Here is where you have to use a little care and common sense. Googling Polish Chicks when looking for new laying hens may get you some websites you don’t want in your browsing history. This rule of mine has led to some good finds over the last few years, but last week was a doosey! I received an email from Daniel commenting on one of my recent rants, and at the bottom was his web address, www.copperly.com. Interesting to note that once we connected, he mentioned that he threw it on the email to me as a fluke. Life lesson here, Meatheads….If you want people to go to your website/store/garage sale PROMOTE IT EVERY CHANCE YOU GET! One of my biggest pet peeves is when I run out of business cards on hand….but I digress.
Anyways, I click on his web link and read that it is a free service to educate members of the Drupal community about better options for credit card processing. A couple things stood out like the aforementioned super sniffer. Those of you that read this newsletter regularly will remember that I wrote recently about the poor customer service I get from my credit card processor. Next, while I believe that you almost always get what you pay for, FREE is a good jumping off point. And finally…what in the wide world of sports is a Drupal??? Is this some new neighborhood development for fans of Brees and Barrymore? Is it a toy top that has replaced the hacky sack at university quads all over the world? Perhaps Tom Cruise had a dust up with L. Ron and formed a new cult? So being nosey I called Daniel to find out what it was all about. It turns out that all my suppositions about Drupal were way off base. It is actually a web design platform. Drupal is to WordPress what PC’s are to Mac’s. Remember how I have been telling you we are working on a complete redesign of our website? This was turning out too good to be true. After a lengthy and rewarding conversation, I was well on my way to reducing the cost of my credit card processing by 33%….that’s HUGE! He is also a web developer in the Drupal world and is evaluating the project of redesigning my public site. And the best part is some of this will probably be done in trade for meat! The barter system is alive and well, and is popping up in the most unlikely places. But that is a topic for another time…
So what did we learn here today, boys and girls? Promote what you want people to know at every opportunity. Be nosey and ask questions, you never know what you will discover. And most importantly….Never forget how funny Steve Martin is (Obscure: “Ohh, I’d hate to see that grindstone!”).