Who knew installing pavers could be so easy?  Have a look.

Sponsored by the Home Depot and Danny Lipford, I’m sure this patio installation will last a good long time.  If by a good long time you mean four weeks.  This is one of the reasons why many contractors have a hard time selling to borderline DIY’ers.  C’mon, Danny.  You know this isn’t the way to build a patio.  Bill Schwab even showed you how a few years ago.  Did you forget?

I think I’m a down to earth guy.  Unless someone has pissed me off, I don’t ever try to ‘big time’ anyone.  So I’m feeling a little bad about the way I’m treating some of the people that are calling me about this site.  For those that have called and never received a reply, it’s not you.  It’s me.

As you may or may not know, I also run a landscaping company.  That means that during the spring and summer, my schedule is as hectic as yours.  Plus I run this site, which adds a little bit to the things I have to do in a day.  I also have a family, and it always tears me up when I feel like I’m not spending enough time with them.  So if I don’t return your call, lack of time is likely one reason.

And like most of you who own companies and get the sense that your employees think you’re made of money, this site is the same.  Last year I bought my wife a middle-of-the-road digital camera with a good chunk of the funds earned from the site.  This site is not a cash cow.  I’m pretty good at making it look that way though, aren’t I?  So when I get a call like I did from Ray in British Colombia, part of me is thinking “I gotta call this guy back and rack up long distance charges?  No thanks.”

The last reason why you may not receive a return call is the gravity of the call.  If you’re like Ray (sorry to pick on you, Ray), leaving a message with nothing more than your first name, phone number and that you’re trying to find some information on one of my sites,  I’m probably going to decide that you need to learn to use the search feature better, or maybe even Google or Yahoo, and then I’ll delete your message.  And remind myself of reasons one and two above.  If you told me your company was going to suffer a terrible fate if I didn’t call back, or even better, if you left a message asking about advertising on our site and who to make the check out to, then you’d probably get a call back right away.

But other than those scenarios, I’m really just too damn busy.  I hope you’ll understand.

Quickbooks, I have a beef with you.

You made me look bad in front of my employees the other day.

I know my ancient Quickbooks Basic 2005 is out of date; so much so that you’ve decided to stop providing payroll updates.  I mean 3-4 years?  That’s just geriatric.  Right?

But I’m skeptical - I don’t think you’re not providing updated payroll subscriptions because it’s too difficult to do it, but because you want to refresh your revenue stream, and the best way to do that is to force people to pay several hundred dollars for both software and payroll subscription upgrades.  But you couldn’t leave well enough alone with that, could you?  You had to guarantee you could roll those customers over - force them in a single-file line at gunpoint from the old versions to the new, more expensive versions.

And you did that by using tactics only seen in use by inkjet printer companies like Hewlett-Packard, who set expiring chips into their ink cartridges, so that even if you just opened a cartridge, if it’s beyond it’s “use by” date, the printer will not accept the cartridge, making it unusable.  Your spin on that concept is to have the software cease to withhold federal and state taxes from employees beyond a certain date.  There are no warnings that taxes are being improperly withheld (or in this case, not withheld), it’s just this silent practical joke that when discovered, totally screws with the 941’s I have to file, and potentially causes tax problems, both for me and my employees.

So I look like an idiot to my people because your software couldn’t just use the older data it had been using in the weeks prior.

Well let me tell you something, mister.  I heard from my accountant that Microsoft is putting together an accounting package based on the most stable and frequently used database language out there:  MySQL  - the same one that this blog uses, and the forum of this site, too.  And you know the folks at Microsoft - their pretty ruthless.  I’d expect them to dump product on the market just to get people (like me, maybe?) to try it.  And if we like it, we might just blog about it.  And others might jump on board.

‘Cause I have to tell you - having fancier graphics in the 2008 version, which seems to multiply threefold the time the software needs to load things process entries, is totally not worth it.

So you’d better clean up yer act, buddy.  Or when this new competitor launches, I’ll be there waving my hand saying “pick me!” when they’re looking for some businesses to try it out.