Getting down to business...

I finally got good and tired of having to beat back the wave of advertising windows that would pop up on the browser of the Windows machine named 'zion' on my network, so I downloaded Ad-aware and ran it.

In doing its scan, it found two suspicious applications (savenow and downloadware), 46 suspicious registry keys, 7 suspicious folders, and 54 other suspicious files. Yikes!

They are all gone, now, according to the application, which is a free download.

* * *I got a call on my home telephone from a local fellow who left a lengthy message whose gist was that he would like to assemble a group to engage in foreign language conversation. In a kind of roundabout way, he moved from acknowledging my proficiency in Russian to wanting to know if I was interested in honing my French conversational skills.

In my life, I've had experience with several such people, whose characteristic feature seems to be wanting to do something "foreign," heavily leavened with a healthy dollop of muddled thinking and a complete absence of planning. (Pete, a balalaika enthusiast I knew in New York, comes to mind here. Beyond the balalaika, which he played poorly, he said he had a "Russian soul," which always brought to my mind the scene from Lawrence of Arabia where Omar Sharif - if memory serves - turns to Peter O'Toole and says, "Ah! Another one of these desert-loving English!")

Anyway, I haven't ruled out giving the fellow a call back, but I hold out no great hopes for this turning into anything viable. Language study, I have found, is hard work.

Anyway, the other day, a customer comes in and somehow, in the course of her transaction, she blurts out that she's a retired French teacher from... some city, I forget where. When I mentioned this fellow and his quest to her and asked if she would be interested in talking to him, she stunned me with her response:

"Well," she said, with something of an attitude, "you know, I get paid for what I do."

While I cannot disagree with her in principle (heck, I get paid for what I do as well), I nonetheless feel there is a place for efforts undertaken pro bono publico (a concept often fettered with the aristocratic/collectivist idea of "giving something back to the community"). Not to mention the fact that often, doing a little something for free can repay itself in ways both monetary and otherwise.

Anyway, I think her response was very poor marketing, to say the least. Then again, maybe she really does want to stay retired, or has had more experience with such people than I have had, and wishes to avoid them at all costs.

* * *I finally figured out the chain of events that led to my confusion regarding my late-paying clients.

I called client X about an overdue invoice; they said they'd get back to me. The next day or so, I got an email from client Y (which I didn't notice until a few days ago) telling me payment had been returned due to a bad address, and would be sent again. For some reason, nothing clicked when, in fact, I got a large envelope with a check from Y, still in its original envelope, showing a bad address.

Anyway, when I resent the missing invoice to X, I also sent along a list of all work done this year for them, so they could make sure we were all caught up. Guess what? There was another invoice they say they didn't get (or the contacts I work with simply don't send them in to accounting). Seeing as how this outfit is a slow payer to begin with, it's hard to tell if an invoice was never received, or is still in the queue to be paid.

Enough of that. Time to hit the hay. Should I try to go to the ham breakfast tomorrow morning? I'll see how I feel.

Cheers...