In the afternoons we would get the Evening Star delivered to the house. The Star brought us up to date on all the news that had happened that day, missed by the early edition of the Washington Post, which had to go to press at midnight. The Star also carried a lot more of the local news. The Lions Club meetings, the high school football games and high school events, and speeches by the Mayor or other dignitaries.

I do miss those days. The cable news and the internet give us the daily and breaking news, but it just is not the same as reading the newspaper in the easy chair with a hot cup of coffee and Lucky sitting beside you.

A woman was calling, crying, to tell me that her son had just committed suicide by taking a massive prescription drug overdose. Both the mother and her son work for us in the warehouse, third shift. So she was calling to let me know that they would not be at work this morning. The bad news was a shock – I had no idea her son was so depressed that he would ever do anything like that and now I feel guilty for not paying more attention to him. How could I not see that something was so terribly wrong in his life that he would do this? But then, it came as a complete surprise to his mother, too.

Its not a scam but its a problem for a lot of people who keep low balances. The hold can be left on the account for several days, depending on which day of the week you buy the gas. If you buy gas on a Friday afternoon, it can be Tuesday midnight before the bank processes the batch orders to make your funds available.

The way to avoid this is to pay cash for gas or to put it on a credit card if you are good about paying the whole balance each month and not letting the charges carry over with interest added to it.

A lot of gas stations have ATMS inside their stores with no fees for using their ATM, like the Thorntons chain in Nashville. You can withdraw the cash and pay for your gas with no problems about fees or holds on your account. I pay cash whenever possible.

At first I was impressed with the way they worked their religious bent into their business. After all, we are living in the bible belt. So here is Christian Realty. That name itself should appeal to a lot of the people in these parts.

And they have a clever tag in their domain name as advertised on the back end of the SUV: The ONE way home dot com. Very clever.

But now notice the letters on the license plate: BAD DRVR.

At least they are honest.

With those thoughts in mind I started surfing for project management companies on the internet and found some that are probably what he has in mind. I really like the information on Atlantic Global’s web site.

They also gave me a birthday card that someone had passed around the office – behind my back – and had everyone sign it.

In the early days when i was exploring the sales and marketing route, I asked a lot of my contemporaries, including other successful sale people and vendors, “What is the difference between “sales” and “marketing”? None of them gave me a good answer. It was only on my own exploration of the sales process and corporate structures that I discovered and embraced marketing. Over the years I’ve mastered quite a bit of the marketing principles and techniques in a variety of corporate settings. Now I am ready to step into the new millenium and learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Obviously I will make use of the internet for a lot of this effort. I have found some good articles about search engine optimization and internet marketing. One interesting aspect of the new marketing is that most of the traditional marketing logic does not apply. You have to shift mental gears into “geek think” instead of what works in the real world, because often they are very different and mistakes on your website can prove very costly and difficult to correct or overcome.