Month: November 2008

The little things are really the big things.

I was thinking the other day about how those little things in life tend to be the big things you remember. It’s particularly noticeable in my business– I’ve had many clients tell me how much they appreciate some seemingly insignificant thing I did for them.

As an example, a while ago I worked with a woman who needed a corporate intranet. I was doing the programming work and had set up her user account to show her how to use the system. She went through it with me (via phone) and then took a week off to get married. While she was gone, I logged into the system and updated her username to reflect her new last name. When she returned from her honeymoon, she was pleasantly surprised to find that her information had been updated (and you know how newlyweds can be). She called me and told me how much she appreciated that gesture, and that thirty seconds of my time has since translated into all kinds of additional projects (and thus income for my company).

Consider how little things enrich our experiences in so many areas:

• The waiter who brings a refill, without being asked, just as you’re finishing the first glass.
• The checker who actually makes eye contact while handing you the receipt and saying “Thank you”.
• The smile or nod from a stranger as you pass them on the sidewalk.
• The bank teller who flips through the stack of twenties and hands you a nice crisp bill instead of the dog-eared one on top of the pile.
• The driver who sees you on your bike and stops to let you cross the intersection, even though they have the right of way.
• The person who holds the door for you at the post office because your arms are full of packages.
• The e-mail or phone message from someone you’ve contacted, telling you they got the message. Even if they can’t do anything about it right away.
• The person with a huge cart in the checkout line who notices you only have two items and lets you cut in front.

In a way it’s fun to spend a few minutes here and a few minutes there doing little things for my clients and friends and family. Sometimes they don’t notice, other times they may but don’t say anything, but many times they comment about how nice it was that I was thinking of them.

If I was a corporate guru (which I’m not) with one piece of advice about how to succeed as a small business, it would be that the little things make a world of difference– for good or bad. Leverage that tiny amount of effort into a positive relationship with a customer (or a friend) that lasts years.

“What’s wrong with you people? You make programming more difficult than it needs to be. I have Frontpage Express to write web pages with, and when I write code with it, I never need to debug it. If you were as good of a programmer as me, you’d never need to debug either.”

— Actual manager of a software developer

I think I set a new record this week… I worked on a total of thirty-three different projects for clients. In five days. And it doesn’t include all of the overhead stuff just to run the business.

I need a vacation.

The National Toy Hall of Fame (who knew?) contains such classic toys as Lego, an Atari 2600 game console, Mr. Potato Head, and a kite. And as of yesterday, it also contains…

a stick.

That’s right, possibly the most timeless toy of all time. According to the museum’s curator, Christopher Bensch:

It’s great to see some fun in the world.

Politics is fascinating, which is why it’s probably the subject of so many of these posts of mine. For example, I find it fascinating* that voters in the Great State of Alaska would elect a Senator who had just been convicted of a felony. Apparently the numbers are still too close to call, but Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens appears to be ahead in the vote count. Yet scarcely a week before the election he was found guilty on all counts of failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions.

* But not in a good way.

It reminds me of that awesome election in the Great State of Missouri when voters elected a dead guy (Mel Carnahan) to the Senate over John Ashcroft. Mel had passed away just short of the election, and since the ballots had already been printed his name was still on them. In the end his wife served in his place, but I can only imagine how warm and fuzzy Ashcroft must have felt when he found out he lost to a corpse. Luckily he went on to a glamorous career as the second-worst Attorney General in history.

So anyway, I guess it goes to show you that you can never tell what the heck the voters are thinking. Or, in some cases, if they’re thinking at all.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”

— Jack Handey

Wow, the voters of Boulder County creamed the Republicans.

It’s not terribly surprising that the liberals of this area lean toward the Democrats, but this was a bloodbath.

In the Presidential race, my guy Bob snagged third place with 402 votes, narrowly edging out the perennial Nader.

I’m happy to see the Boston Tea Party garnered 14 votes, although the Prohibition and Pacifist parties only took home a single vote each. It would have been interesting to see how well Ron Paul would have done if write-ins had been allowed.

Ahh, the fun of modern technology: cracking open various electronics and looking at the nice shiny parts inside.

I have a stack of old hard drives and decided to pop one open and grab the magnets. These things are spiffy: they’ll literally slide across the desk and hop up on the hard drive (because there’s a strong magnet inside it). Now if I can just think of something to do with those silver platters…

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing… after they’ve tried everything else.”

— Winston Churchill

President Obama, eh?

It beats President McCain, I guess…