Yet another morning spent in front of the computer, delegating tasks to our talented employees, drawing logo designs, managing hosting accounts…the one thing I’m not doing this morning is client correspondence. That’s because I started work at three (okay, I’m in my pajamas at my kitchen table, but I’m working!), and when you get emails timestamped three in the morning, you start to wonder if these people aren’t flesheaters. My infant son is one of those infants who simply starts yelling because he wants something, and after I’ve given him his bottle and his poor mother a break, my mind starts racing about all the awesome stuff I’m going to do today.
It’s not that racing that the mind does when it ponders on all the stuff it HAS to do today. That’s the kind of racing that wears one out, similar to racing a three-year-old along the underside of the train at the playground. No, this is the racing that energizes, rejuvinates, inspires. In short, I love web marketing. And the reason I’m being so pointlessy introspective (aside from this being the Internet, where we’re SUPPOSED to publish the innermost workings of our hearts) is to emphasize to all our clients who never read our blog that we’ll do excellent work because we enjoy it.
I’m reminded of a time when I was younger and hated my job. I was a busboy at a steakhouse in Tempe, Arizona, and I was learning at an early age that I like having fun more than earning money. Being a busboy at a better restaurant was easily the best employment a lad could have in those days, from an earning perspective, but the work sucked. The hours were lousy and you made all your money on Friday and Saturday nights, when the other high schoolers were out doing awesome things that they would remember until their ten-year reunions. And I was wiping tables, spilling icewater on little old ladies, and inadvertently sticking my thumb in someone’s horseradish because the light was low and it was the same color as the plate. So I was on my way from the dishwasher’s area to the dining area when I saw a fork on the kitchen floor. As anyone in my situation might do, I stomped on it in such a manner that the toe of my shoe struck the upward-pointing tines, and, like the pee-wee in Laurel & Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers, sent it sailing through the air and plop! into the vat of ranch dressing about thirty feet away! I laugh uproariously now, but at the time…well, I’m pretty sure I laughed uproariously then, too. Then I headed out into the dining area.
If I had loved my job, I would have run, bellowing, for the vat of dressing, hurled it into the dishwasher’s gigantic steel sink, taped off the area with yellow caution tape, and probably checked the MSDS to see what would make the dressing vat a worthy vessel for ingestible substances once more. I would have gotten out a new basin and filled it with fresh, unadulterated ranch dressing, and gone home that evening feeling like I’d conquered in an epic struggle. Instead, I smirked at the unsuspecting fools who had ranch dressing later that night and for two weeks thereafter, because that’s about how often the dressing receptacle got replaced. I also told John, who bore an uncanny resemblance to The Count, and we made numerous attempts to repeat the feat with no success.
I love web marketing, and if I get wind that something we did isn’t up to par, I run, bellowing, to the closest computer to fix it.