We went out tonight to see a bunch of bands play here in town. went to the billabong club, a seedy hole in the wall pool hall in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the tracks. They don't even have a stage, but they let bands set up and play for the fans, and in this non-scene that is South Florida, that's something. Everyone was there. for a brief moment it felt like the old days. seeing people we haven't seen in years. all the different singers and musicians. This band psycho daisies will do that in the scene. They’ve been around forever. have this cult mystique about them. at one point their bass player died and his girlfriend ended up taking over on bass. Things like that. just over the top infamy. So when they play everyone shows up.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the Squirrel, who I had not seen in years. usually whenever she sees me she runs. Many years ago she had this idea in her mind that the Wolf and I had put a curse on her. seriously. I don't even know how people come up with some of their ideas. But anyway, she would always run from me in public when ever she would see me and honestly it caused me great frustration and trauma. It just didn't vibe with my overly social nature. I couldn’t make it fit that she felt this way about me since we had been so close for some time. I had always been one of her biggest fans and very supportive. But there it was for years. so for some time I had always just tried to be polite and whenever I saw her in public I would just try to avoid her so as not to cause her any upset.

This night was no different. I saw her and my whole body cringed. Great, squirrels here. man I hope she doesn’t freak out and start screaming and make a scene, as she is prone to do sometimes. An hour later I'm standing at the bar and she starts coming at me. I freeze. But instead she smiles and says to me ‘I'm really sorry for how I have treated you the last few years. I was just really sick and I'm all better now. it wasn't you. and I hope you know that.’ and then she hugs me. I hug her back and before I know it I'm crying. And then she's crying. And its this sob fest. I just let out all this pain from the experience of all of that that I was hanging on to. it was awesome.

Bought a new laptop. But that's not the point. My old laptop was a little over a year old and smoked. A true desktop replacement. But carrying it around on my back all the time, all 8.7 pounds of her, was too much. I didn't need a new one. But I wanted one. Something super-light and super-small. A sleek and powerful machine that I could carry around like more of a notebook. so I shopped around, did the research. I wasn't married to dell. In fact I hated dell for outsourcing tech support to India. Not because I'm against outsourcing to foreign countries, because I'm not. Outsourcing to foreign countries is an inevitability of the global economy, and in the end I believe going to be a good thing for us all. In fact outsourcing to foreign countries is the only chance America has at remaining the superpower that it is. The democrats running on the “we’ll bring your old jobs back to America” ticket is bullshit and they know it as much as the rest of us do. American doesn’t need its old jobs back; we need new jobs. If people are so against outsourcing to foreign countries, take off all your gold, return your nike shoes, stop shopping at the gap, don't use pencils, or any other office supplies, stop going to home depot because everything in there is made in some foreign country. forget about it. globalization is here. yes it sucks for the workers here who are getting laid off, but we have to find the next place where we fit in, we can’t be trying to force our tongue into some chicks mouth who doesn’t like us. Lets put it this way; we've been evicted. Its time to move on.

We have to rise up to our potential as a working people and innovate new industries where we can find new jobs. That's the sad truth. And for all the older folk out there who are fretting that, we hear you, and we feel your pain. we’re with you. and we’re all going to try to help. But lets face it. its done. Every major company in America has moved its business and factories and phone rooms overseas. No I don't hate dell or Sony or amex or cisco or linksys or bestbuy or anyone else for outsourcing because I'm against globalization; I hate them because the service sucks ass overseas. These idiots are years behind us in customer service. That's why we can get away with paying them so little. They don't even know how to answer the phone, let alone have a conversation with an American, and forget about solving our problems. So dell was history to me. I was looking to move on. Find a new laptop company to give my money to. what were the choices? Migrate over to mac? Still might. Always the temptation, but the learning curve always puts me off. And besides, I am totally married to my PDA and i need to be able to hotsynch a few times a day. I don't know what that's going to be like with mac. [Any suggestions?] So the choices were Sony vaio, cool looking machines with built in cameras? Love it. or ibm thinkpads. Solid machines. And then there’re a bunch of the smaller players .. if you’re just looking for a good deal. But that wasn't my thing. I was looking for a wife, not a mistress. I'm on my laptop up to fourteen hours a day. I sleep with it for gods sake. I wanted my next wife to be fast, sexy, good to me, easy to use, clean, comfortable, great features, a real looker, skinny and lightweight, and more than anything else, reliable and dependable and easy to fix. if I had a problem with her I wanted it fixed right there that day or the next, no questions asked. No bullshit hidden rules guidelines or fine print. No taking it to comp usa. No sending it in for repair. Just get my baby working again. After checking on technical support and repair options with all the major companies, dell was the only one who offered me that choice. for an extra two hundred bucks I received unlimited lifetime tech support and a one hundred percent warranty on the machine. I could throw that baby off a bridge into a river and they guarantee that they’ll be there the next day fishing her out and getting her working again. When I protested having to talk to the idiots in India who know less about dell computers than my mom does, and my good old mom knows next to nothing about computers, they said ‘fine, we’ll give you Gold tech support. We’ll guarantee we’ll answer your call within two minutes or less every time and we’ll give you a special number where your calls are routed to a VIP room with top rated technicians in Texas. No overseas calls for you. no India, no Philippines, not even Canada for you. Only America. Of course this was an extra eighty bucks, but fucking a, that's unbelievable. Hard to believe. So I can just break this thing now and tomorrow you'll come out here and fix it? yep. Good things. of course the irony that we now have to pay extra to speak with customer service reps in our own country did not escape me. what have we come to? a strange place in deed.

Well wouldn’t you know it, two days after my new baby arrives ---a slick beauty weighing in at only 4 pounds, no bigger than an inch around the waist, 1.8 ghz speed, a full gig of ram, cdwriter, DVD burner, built in Bluetooth and wireless, what a beauty indeed --- but the screen breaks. Lcd goes bad. Sure enough the next day some guy is at my office with a new screen. Unbelievable. So they weren't fooling around.

So what's the lesson? Brothers and sisters its simple. Success in the new global economy where anyone can do what you do three months after you start doing it and chances are they’ll find some way to do it better and faster and cheaper, customer service is the new quality. Its all going to come down to customer service now. quality anyone can do. but customer service is going to determine the winners and survivors now. 

Now I will ramble incoherently for a brief time. good time to take a pee break if you have to.

Take Amazon for instance. Can’t get much better customer service than what they have set up there in the last few years.

You see a movie. You hear a song you like in the film. You don't know who it is. you go to Amazon.com. you look up the movie soundtrack. You sample all the tracks from the movie. You buy the soundtrack CD with one click and it shows up at your house. or perhaps you only want that song so you double click on itunes, type in that song title and with one click you purchase it. You now own that song and can listen to it on your computer all you want. All this in less than two minutes (I clocked it). The song in question was hands of time by groove armada. SICK. I’m talking SICK fucking song. In less than a minute more, I sampled a few other tracks from the CD on itunes, clicked back over to Amazon.com, and purchased every groove armada album they carried, along with all the Nick Drake CDs they had. 

This is why itunes is winning the game. This is why Amazon is winning the game. Are there other places to buy music on the Internet? Sure there are. But none better or even close Amazon in features and usability. Remember cdnow.com? Amazon bought them. Virgin mega stores website? Nothing but a front for Amazon. They own the market. Will they forever? Don't know. that's a few paragraphs below. but just for fun though, look at the chart below. Amazon’s five year stock history. Its fascinating. The crash of 2000 in bold clear lines. From a high of 98 to a low of 5.50 in a matter of a year. Our survival through the last four years, albeit through overextending on credit and deflated interest rates, is a testament to all of us and our determination not to fail. Now we have to work twice as hard for half as much. Well unless you're tom cruise. Hey did anyone see Collateral? Cool flick. Not a movie really, certainly not a film, but a cool flick nonetheless.

[O.k. the point before we forget? Music. God I cannot stop listening to this groove armada song. It just makes me so happy! music. it just makes us so happy. I picture being out on stage with my boys. Playing and singing and smiling. I miss playing so much right now. o.k. that wasn't really the point. But I had to.]

Onward:

O.k. where was I? Yes,
Now when you find something laying around the house, you don't think salvation army; you think eBay. And sure enough. See that new PDA in aluminum alloy that you just gotta have? but what will you do with the one you just bought six months ago? Easy. EBay. I never worry about buying technology if I want it, because if I don't want to give my current gadget away to someone I love, then I know I can just sell it on eBay and get good bank for it. this is the wonderful world we live in.

Think of things like e-checks and online bill paying. We receive notification of a bill via email in our inbox. We click a button on the screen, transfer to a site, type in a few passwords, and hit Pay. The bill is paid. this is one of those situations where first one out of the gate wins the race. paypal was the first to go big with online money transfer. Not a brilliant idea. Anybody could have thought of it and everybody did. it was a dire need we had as consumers. But they were the first to cross the finish line. eBay is another great example of this. so is yahoo.

Ferret and Cleopatra and I call this the opening game, referring to chess, whenever we talk about business, which we used to do obsessively. Cleo and I sill talk about business all the time. whenever we get a chance. The opening game theory is the one I described above. A lot of companies win that way. but that doesn’t mean you will succeed in the long run.