J. Philip Faranda

I stopped by the KMart in Yorktown yesterday to pick up 1 thing. It should have taken a few minutes. Instead, there were three lines open (out of 8) with half a dozen people in them each, and no express checkout. And the cashiers in the available lines moved at a glacial pace, as if they were paid by  the frutration level of the shoppers.

I ended up putting my jumbo toilet paper back on the shelf and left empty handed.

KMart has been a retailer for decades. Haven't they figured it out yet? Keeping the checkout line moving isn't rocket science.

Link  Thus far 78 thumbs up. 

I wonder if the knee jerk types lobbing bombs at Bob Turner even know a thing about the guy other than his involvement with the Jerry Springer Show and that he's (horrors!) Roman Catholic. 

A sober, dispassionate read of his life and achievements show far more substance than the career politicians we seem to love who clearly suck. He was also involved in the Phil Donahue Show, which was groundbreaking. He was GM of CBS Cable. His fingerprint was on many good programs, which is easy to overlook when one works for a TV network and all its crap. 

Perhaps Congress would function better if we had people there who actually worked for a living.

http://sitelife.lohud.com/ver1.0/gocomm?ck=CommentKey%3a1c8a2449-a7ba-4866-9a...

While I am not a fan of 500 people gathering outside a guy's house with coffins and grim reapers, I am more dismayed at the vitriol cast at striking Verizon employees. The Verizon employees I know are good, hardworking people. They are a big reason why the company is profitable. 

We were Cablevision customers for quite a few years- you call that a choice? Cablevision treated us like garbage. Anytime a Verizon guy came to our home or office they acted professionally and did their work well. If the company is billions in the black, they should not fix/cut back what isn't broken. 

Yes, CWA workers are fortunate to have jobs. Have we sunk so low that being employed is now the bar for everyone? The CWA isn't making demands for more- they simply don't want what they have negotiated in good faith over the years cut when a healthy company they helped build cries wolf.

http://sitelife.lohud.com/ver1.0/gocomm?ck=CommentKey%3a1c8a2449-a7ba-4866-9a...

While I am not a fan of 500 people gathering outside a guy's house with coffins and grim reapers, I am more dismayed at the vitriol cast at striking Verizon employees. The Verizon employees I know are good, hardworking people. They are a big reason why the company is profitable. 

We were Cablevision customers for quite a few years- you call that a choice? Cablevision treated us like garbage. Anytime a Verizon guy came to our home or office they acted professionally and did their work well. If the company is billions in the black, they should not fix/cut back what isn't broken. 

Yes, CWA workers are fortunate to have jobs. Have we sunk so low that being employed is now the bar for everyone? The CWA isn't making demands for more- they simply don't want what they have negotiated in good faith over the years cut when a healthy company they helped build cries wolf.

I think that of the 750 million members of Facebook, 50 million are consultants who won't just come out and say they are consultants. If your business model is to get me to pay you to help me improve my business, you are a consultant. 

You aren't an evangelist.
You aren't a maven. 
You aren't a revolutionary force. 
You are not a king-maker. 

And if your "about" page is filled with aspirational, world changing jargon and doesn't explain how you pay your bills (i.e., "I am a lawyer." "I am a business consultant." "I am a former real estate broker tuned SEO consultant."), then I see no reason to do business with you, because I find evasiveness to be a huge turn off. 

Don't oversell yourself. "About" should be facts, not hype. You know who hypes themselves and demurs on results? Real estate agents, your target audience in many cases. And you can't bullshit the bullshitters. If I click on your about page, I want to know how you pay your bills first and foremost. What do you do? Not how well you do in your mystery profession. Tell me what you do. You consult. You do SEO. You are a virtual assistant. "I help you build your online empire" is not enough. Spill it. 

By all mean show me some results you have produced. A happy client whose business tripled. A testimonial letter. That's good, because it isn't YOU bragging, it is someone else vouching for you. It's a referral. It's an endorsement of your consulting work. 

Maybe it is a generational thing, but a 44 year old curnudgeon like myself needs a little order. Tell me what you do first. Peppering your bio/about with your pet, kids and millenial jargon ("I'm an iPad Ho." "I am a Twitterazi.") is a shell game in my view- you are trying to obfuscate something. What it is you're hiding I don't know, but believe me when I tell you that I know fake it till you make it from a  mile away. Save that for later. File it under personal or something. 

I don't speak Gen-Y. I speak English. And I work very hard running my own company that I built from nothing. I like real. 

If you want my business you should be real too, because there is no sustainability in making your living being long on vague promises and short on specifics. That's just the cyber version of a clip on tie.