Hip Replacement — Expletives Included

My latest and greatest Web-site design was suppose to be up and running yesterday. If you've been to my site, you'll notice it's the same design as last week. Grrr!

I hired a designer to make me look stylish and hip. After all, last year's "hip" is this year's hip replacement. What the designer came up with is stunning. It's clean, simple and really sets off my photography.

In April the redesign was delivered to my Web host and for some reason it's taken a month to get it posted. Yesterday I received an e-mail saying the project was ready to go live. All I had to do was sign off on it.

An expletive is a word or phrase that is used to fill out a sentence or a line of verse without adding to the sense. By definition, you would think that expletives do nothing more than add fat to a sentence. This is far from the truth — especially when I saw that a switch had been made. Frankly, a lot of expletives were used. None of which were "fatty" words simply used in order to fill out my sentences. Nope. My expletives were specifically used to punctuate and communicate the fact that I was angry and not going to sign off on a foreign design.

The lesson I learned and want to tell you about is that we should always be nice to one another. Hire professionals to do that which professionals do. Pay their price (it's so worth it), but above all, be nice!

If you are a mean person, like the guy who called (before coffee) to tell me how much I "suck," you will be the equivalent of a metal trash can placed over someone's head that is being struck repeatedly with a club. You will only be annoying and provoke a negative reaction. And when your project goes bad, nobody will care.

By being nice, people think good thoughts and they might do a few extra "favors" simply because they like you (well, me anyway). Another thing about being nice is that when things go awry, you are much more credible and people will go out of their way to return you to your previous, happy state.

The new and improved Web site should be delivered tomorrow. It's going to be very nice. After redoing the files and shipping them to my site host in San Francisco, my designer called me from Seattle to make sure I was happy. She's also called my printer to make sure that work is on track and then she called a New York agency that I do business with — she wanted to ensure they were getting what they needed.

Always be nice until it's time to not be nice. Choose your words carefully and make sure your spicy expletives season your language, not make it fatty.

I would like to take this time, on this date, May the seventh, in the year of our Lord, two-thousand-and-nine, to thank you very much for coming to, and reading my Web log, also known as a blog. It is my hope that you have been most excellently uplifted by my less-than concise use of the English language.