Aaron Ewer

My cell phone is too much for me to handle. I have to admit it, but I hate no idea ow to use three quarters of the features and options that are on it. I don’t even know how to take a picture with the damn thing.

Although I’m not that big a fan of the downloaded ringtones and fancy wallpapers, I came across a website that had a really catchy tune that was available as a downloadable ringtone. So, I thought, “It will be pretty unique and even maybe a conversation starter, so I’ll give it a try.” There were multiple screens and info fields to fill in, so I worked my way through mot of them. Then it came down to the question of which type of cell phone do I have? Well, on the front of the phone it says, “Nokia” and that is all it says anywhere on the phone or in the 4 thousand option menus built into the phone display. I have absolutely no idea what damn model number this is and no idea of how to find out.

So forget about the cute ringtone I wanted. I guess I should feel fortunate that the damn thing rings any tune at all and allows me to talk on it.

A few jobs ago one of the executives was a highly educated but productively worthless marketing guru. He talked all the high dollar words, but when it came to putting results on the board he usually came up empty. These guys with the V.P. titles and too big bank accounts drive me nuts - I’m all about results. So it didn’t bother me much when I learned he left the company under a “mutual agreement.”

Since I didn’t consider him a friend, I was surprised to get an email from him a couple weeks ago announcing his new company. He has bought the territory rights to most of the southeastern states to launch a new product and he’s taking it on a roadshow to promote it. He made arrangements with Sam’s Club to put up a display for one week at a time at rotating Sam’s Club locations.

So out of curiosity, I stopped by the local Sam’s Club to check it out and see if he was doing any business. I have to admit the display was nice and it was getting it’s fair share of attention from the shoppers. He had a 10 x 10 carpet laid out, four chairs - one on each corner of the carpet, and a nice, eyecatching backdrop with lights and graphics. The two blondes with big hair and bigger cleavage handing out brochures didn’t hurt, either.

Chatting with him in between customers, he told me that his cost of entry into the business was minimal. He bought the custom trade show displays from a company online called the “Godfrey Group” and couldn’t be more pleased with all the design help and cost effective solutions they provided to produce the most important part of his road show exhibit, the portable display wall.

So it looks like he is off to a good start and maybe has finally found his calling - out of the big corporate world and into entrepreneurism.

Open letter to Don Imus,

Dude - wake up. You are a bigot in denial.

You need to attend some racial and diversity sensitivity training because bad things keep coming out of your mouth on the radio.

And you know what? I would respect you more if you stood by your words, however illspoken, rather than listen to you stutter and stammer and apologize and try to backpedal on what you said.

Last night I covered a carrier route for someone who had an emergency and couldn’t report to work. It was an interesting experience to be driving around the neighborhoods in the “Land of Excess.” I have to say that you can learn quite a bit about people by observing their homes at 4:00 am when they are sleeping or away.

This time of year one of the hard parts of a carrier’s job is keeping track of who has gone away on vacation and who has come back. I had to start a chart on a white board to keep up with all these wealthy travelers.

The hardest part of this job for someone new to the route is hunting and finding the right houses and driveways. Even in this “Land of Excess” there are people who use the cheapest stick on numbers they can find to put their house number on their mailbox, and it is interesting to see over the course of a few weeks which numbers fall off and which homeowners care not to replace the numbers.

Many mailboxes, the primary way to determine a home’s address, have vines and flowers growing up and over the the post and the box which completely cover or obstruct the numbers. Some boxes have no numbers at all - the homeowner has chosen to nail individual brass or painted numbers onto their garage door or adjacent to the entrance door. Try finding those numbers from the street in the dark and in the rain!

The state needs to pass a law requiring all buildings to be located on a named street or road (not just a highway route number) and to display their numbered address in a manner that will be visible from the road, in the dark and in the rain. The numbers need to be large, bright, reflective and easy to see by a driver coming from both directions of the road. In case of an emergency, this could easily save lives.

Our CEO is a high profile man who travels most of the time. His life is truly a series of airport to hotel to board meeting to airport type of days. He flies all over the country 5 days a week but insists on being home with his family on the weekend. If he absolutely cannot be home on the weekend he often arranges for his family to be flown out to wherever he is meeting so they can have some short trips away and spend time with him. I admire his resolve and dedication to his family.

Last week he was supposed to fly back to Nashville from a Las Vegas convention. The flight was supposed to stop in Houston, but with such bad weather, his flight was diverted to Arkansas. With it being so late and with the really bad weather, he couldn’t find another commercial flight to get him home for the final leg of his trip. I overheard his secretary begging the travel agent to find a way to get him home, and what they ended up doing was chartering a private plane from Arkansas to Nashville.

He sang the praises of the charter service called Wing Aviation when he came in the office the next day. He says the plane was first class equipment, the crew was top notch and they got him home safely and quickly. What more could you ask for? Thank goodness his secretary and the travel agent were resourceful enough to search for and find the keywords airplane charter Arkansas to find Wing Aviation’s contact number and get him home that night.