Tag Archive for: Communications

Our paperboy recently exemplified how important it is to communicate with your customer. After several missed deliveries, I had made up my mind to write to the paper and give them a piece of my mind. Receiving a paper after you’ve left for work is simply not acceptable, I reasoned. “A paper delayed is a paper denied,” I was going to be telling them. (Not bad, eh?)

The best entrepreneurial training I ever received was working at my uncle’s service station when I was a teenager in Lower West Pubnico. It was a gathering site for people, mostly fishermen, and the conversation was usually pretty lively. My uncle had a joke: if the place ever caught fire, the headline in the paper would read Service Station Burns Down — 200 Men Left Homeless.

Ever since I installed Windows 7, whenever my computer comes out of sleep mode I swear I hear the first two notes of the B.J. Thomas song Hooked on a Feeling. And then there’s the computer at the lottery booth in my building that, whenever an instant-win ticket loses, it goes into the opening riff of Spirit in the Sky. “Da-dowwwng”.

When I first met Chris Lambie, the new Herald Business Editor, I explained that I always strive for my column to be about real life business situations where technology plays a part, and to speak from personal experience as opposed to secondary research.

We were working on an important proposal just at the time when my business partner, Dave Nicholson, and his wife Judy were scheduled to travel to Mexico on vacation. Since Dave’s job is to keep me from giving away the farm, it was important for us to collaborate on this proposal no matter where in the world he happened to be at the time. So we decided it was a good time to try out some long distance Internet telephone usage.

We agreed ahead of time when Dave would be available for a call, and when I contacted him I found him (naturally) in a bar. Judy was using his laptop at the time, so she informed Dave that his computer was “ringing”.

When we connected I was amazed at how clear he sounded – except that his voice was much deeper, and he sounded like one of those deep synth disk jockeys. “Hellooowrmph!” I guess when his voice was broken up, sent through cyberspace and put back together – sort of like those transporters on Star Trek – something must have happened to enhance it.