Just hit about 300 lines in less than 2 hours. For me during daytime, with some of my least favorite doctors and several unfamiliar words to look up, that’s not too bad. On a good day, with good doctors, I can do 200 lines in one hour, but that’s not been my luck so far. It’s lunchtime now, so I can type this without losing any time. Brent still has Ariel out and about, but then the ideal is for her to come home and take a nice, long nap (which she hasn’t been doing lately, making it harder to get anything done), so I can continue working without disturbance, and maybe play with her for a little either before or after dinner. I hate not having time to play with my daughter, after all, that’s why I’m here.

Some days the worst part of medical transcription are the days when you just keep hitting the wrong keys. Gets worse when the wrong keys turn up a word expansion I didn’t mean to do, so instead of deleting a couple letters, I may have to delete an entire phrase. But word expanders are very worthwhile in medical transcription and save lots of keystrokes. Probably useful elsewhere as well, but I’m generally less concerned with that.

Why is it so easy to get so far behind?

OK, so when the main computer in the house crashes completely, and it takes days to find out how to restore it (thank goodness I was able to back up a few things before wiping them out), it’s easy to lose track of time and spend too much time on it. I’ll keep saying it - don’t get Service Pack 2 for Windows XP until Microsoft fixes it. For some it works perfectly, but for hard working computers like mine, it can be an utter disaster. I’m still scrounging for discs to some of the programs I need to get things done!

The upshot of this is that I am way, way behind on transcription, and there’s only today and tomorrow left in the pay period. I’ve told Brent to keep our daughter out of my hair today; I really don’t have time to play. Sad but true. If I make 1000 lines today and tomorrow, I’ll still be way behind, but I’ll have accomplished something at least.

It’s just the wrong time to have to do this. We’re going to have to move out of our current home by December, ideally, so we have to hunt apartments too. They aren’t cheap in San Diego, though. Buying is much out of the question, when small condos can run 250-300k and up and up. We’re looking at a place in the complex where my younger sister lives in Ramona, very affordable but a drive to get anywhere. Plus side is my sister’s two daughters are seven months older and one year younger than Ariel, so there’d be playmates available. Brent’s trying so hard to get a better job so that we can find a better place, but who knows when a job will come through.

And of course, with the new baby coming, life won’t settle down next year. But that’s a good kind of hectic.

It’s alive!! Well, sort of.

What else can I say. I don’t know what killed my computer the other day, but it was simply not working. Start bar vanished after it was on for a few minutes, which was very frustrating. Even more annoying, it failed just as I was about to possibly finish the absolute minimum needed for promoting my jewelry website! Very painful. Good thing I had uploaded everything.

Fortunately, we have access to some of those thumb-size memory sticks that work in a USB port. The computer ran fine in Safe Mode, but you can’t burn a CD. So I was able to back up my files anyhow using the memory sticks. Very painful to do with only 2-128 MB sticks and my medical transcription computer to transfer the results to CD. It took a very long time.

Now I’m busily trying to get the email boxes to work on everyone’s Netscape profiles. It’s not easy, but I have Brent’s working now and am working on mine. For some reason, more of my profile appears to have been saved. I might even get my bookmarks back, yet Brent’s weren’t saved, nor were Lisa’s. I do not know why. I did the same thing to get each file, deleting things as necessary to have enough room. Killing the trash can, after all, is not a big deal. Had to kill a couple of my Inboxes too, but I was able to limit that to ones which the server keeps my emails anyhow, so the damage should be minimal, aside from probably having to download a million emails and redeleting the ones I don’t want.

Call this a good reminder to back up EVERYTHING regularly.

Ariel’s had an exciting time here lately too. A couple weeks ago, we saw some catepillars make coccons on our fennel plant, about a dozen of them, so we took four of them and put them in a small cage. Two hatched yesterday. They’re swallowtail butterflys and very pretty. After their wings unfurled we released them. Ariel was pretty good about that, although I could tell she was disappointed. She kept asking us to go out and get her butterflys back. Nice miniature nature lesson for her.

It’s been quite a weekend.

Ariel is getting very interested in my medical transcription work. She loves to pretend to listen to the doctors just like mommy, and often puts my headphones on her teddy bear too.

We’re looking at moving in the next few months. Brent keeps thinking apartment, but I’m pricing mobile homes - not pretty, but cheaper than apartments and you’re building some sort of equity. More room in most cases too. Can’t afford a standard home in this market, so this strikes me as a fair alternative. Other thing we’re considering is moving north a county or two, so we’re still near relatives but not that far away.

I almost have my jewelry website up. Just a little more to go, but I need the domain name to propagate to the host I decided to point it to (I needed more features than my other hosting had) in order to finish it up. Pure torture having to wait sometimes. I want to start marketing and getting links for it!

I’ve joined Digital Point’s Coop Advertising Network. It puts ads for other sites on the bottom of my website (on Aspects of Home Business only at this point; I’m still testing) and places my ad on other websites. Some people have apparently had good results already with this in terms of backlinks listed in the search engines. I’m going to see how it works before adding it to my other websites, but if it works like me as it does for others, it will be well worth my time.

Plumbers!!!

We were supposed to get the kitchen faucet reinstalled on Tuesday. That day they called me and said the project was too big, and told me we were rescheduled for today, Friday, with a half day allotted for the plumber to do his job. He came in, looked at the job and said it would take 2-3 hours, but he didn’t have room in his schedule so he called his office, and they insisted he reschedule us for Tuesday!

I did get a compromise out of him. He connected the gas stove today, so we can at least cook again. I can cope with doing dishes in the bathroom, but I am very tired of living off the microwave. I’m not happy about this, since it was supposed to be scheduled right today, but I can live with it.

Now, what does this have to do with home business?

Think customer service. Am I a happy customer for this company? Will I call them again?

One reschedule was marginally forgiveable; we’ve used this company before and liked them. But two?

Given that they were given all the information about the job on the first phone call, they should have gotten it right the first time. It is not like we got the plumber here and added a bunch of work on; after all, he didn’t even make it here that first day. Someone in the office looked at the job order and said it couldn’t be done before he even arrived.

If you’re in home business, customer service needs to be a priority. That means answering your emails in a reasonable time period, taking care of problems and delivering on your promises.

It’s been a day for thinking about things related to home business for me. I had a girl come by selling educational books. I let her in, even though the budget really doesn’t allow for much right now, to listen to her sales pitch. I used to be an excellent salesperson when I was in jewelry sales, so I enjoy listening to a good pitch, or giving pointers when one falls short. Call it a hobby.

Her pitch wasn’t bad, but she did use one technique that always annoys me. She told me that books in bookstores can run anywhere from $8-35, and then used the $35 price to show what a great value her books were at only $12 each for 24 books, so $288. That’s great, but I know I can get a lot of books for less than $12 each. Perhaps it’s a personal preference, but I like it better when they use an average price for such calculations, rather than the high price. Compare with $20 books, and you still get a favorable comparison without seeming to ignore the full range of pricing available.

She also made quite a few assumptions, which can be risky. She couldn’t really get her pitch around the fact that Ariel already knows her alphabet and numbers, so those books would serve minimal purpose.

On the plus side, she did ask if I knew some of the parents she had sold to previously, so I would perhaps be familiar with some of the people who liked her products. She also asked which houses also had children, and remembered to use names of families she had already visited, one of whom was a playmate of Ariel’s from across the street. Didn’t say if they had bought, of course, but showed she was paying attention.

All in all, she did a fair job. Not stellar, but pretty good. She kept in mind who her target would be buying for, and did not offer the books she had for much older children.

What can you learn to improve your business by interacting with other businesses?