Alphabet Soup

Went to get some boots fixed today. Pretty simple stuff really. My daughter needed some new heels on her dressy cowboy boots. I tried to fix them last night but ended up with a small mess on my hands an almost a fatal error. The moral – don’t mess around with super glue! Your skin will stick together and everything it touches turns to – well it gets stiff and scaly.

Moments after my mishap, I googled super glue to find out that it comes from (believe it or not) Rancho Cucamonga California. For anyone old enough to recall, I think that city was part of some Jack Benny routine. Who’s Jack Benny you ask? Nevermind.

Was I talking about alphabet soup? Not yet.

Super glue. I emailed them from the website and today got a response from a nice lady telling me what to do.

Please note for future super glue catastrophes: Acetone – otherwise known as nail polish remover is the weapon of choice against super glue.

Fortunately the heels are fixed, thanks to A-1 Boot Repair and $12.

Back to letters.

For most of my life, the prime source or at least a prime source of information would be the Yellow Pages. Now today I don’t even know if they are called that anymore and there must be several clones of similar content that arrive uninvited, at my door or mailbox.

In their heyday I seem to recall that one of the tricks of Yellow Pages marketing was to name your company something with the first word having the letter “A” in it. Note A-1 Boot Repair above. Acme whatever (see Road Runner cartoons – everything in a box was Acme something or other.) The reason of course is that when you flip to “Boot Repair” in said Yellow Book, if your business name started with A, you’d be first, no matter how much somebody else paid to get a display ad or to have theirs in bold – the A’s went first. (Note – technically in our Yellow Pages – A-1 Boot Repair is not even listed under Boot Repair – just one company – Tom’s Shoe Repair. I found A-1 under “Shoe Repair and yes indeedy, they are first. Now Tom is smart: he bought a large display ad just about one inch below but he’s still not first.

For awhile it got silly. How many times have you seen a truck go by that said AAA Tree Service or AAAA Plumbing. What do all those “A”’s have to do with tree or plumbing? Maybe, just maybe AAA Tree Service is owned by Alfred, Alvin and Alice but more than likely it is only about placement in the Yellow Pages. Which got me to thinking.

Today Google is on everyone’s lips or browsers I guess would be more appropriate. Quick aside here – do you hate or love the automatic spell-check in Microsoft Word? The thing where if you might be misspelling a word, it puts a squiggly little red line underneath the word to alert you that you are about to make a grave error? Guess what? Google gets a squiggly little red line. Is that part of a plot on Microsoft’s part? Dunno. But the word “Microsoft” which by the way, what does that mean? Anyway Microsoft does NOT have a squiggly red line underneath. Some someone writing code in Redmond decided that Microsoft is a real word and spelled properly but Google is not. If you use their built in spell-checker it suggests that instead of Google you try: Goggle, go ogle, goggles, gouge, goggled and googol as more appropriate options.

The big thing with almost every business on the Internet is how to get their Google rankings up. Everyone wants to be first on the list when a term, subject or some-such gets “Googled”. But the google-folks are very secretive about how they determine who gets at the top. In some ways they are very old fashioned. If you pay you can get at the top in a different color or be placed on the side next to all the search results. But I think the coveted spot is to be number one in the main list. When some results come back with numbers in the millions, being at the top or even on the first page is worth plenty. My understanding though is that you can not buy being #1. It just has to happen based on some algorithm developed by the Google-ites. This is based on a mix of criteria that is as secret as the Colonel’s recipe or the Coke formula.

If someone can come up with the simple plan that worked for businesses in the Yellow Pages for decades, they’ll have invented the newest and bestest mouse-trap.