I’ve cooled off a little bit, but I must tell you, I was quite annoyed this morning when I checked my email. I woke up in a good mood because both of my daughters slept through the night, which means I got my first full night of rest in three years. That’s no exaggeration, either. But it’s beside the point.

Let me set the story up a little bit.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a lead through my website’s contact form. I called the person back and we had a great discussion. When I asked him if he’d be speaking with some other VAs he told me he didn’t have the time and wanted to get started. So, I emailed him a copy of my agreement with the understanding that he would forward more project details and we would get underway.

I didn’t receive a reply, I followed up a couple times and he finally said that he found another VA that charges substantially less than I do, and she wowed him by taking the initiative and actually doing some of the work with no prompting from him, nor an agreement or payment for it. Needless to say, he was impressed.

So, this morning when I checked my email I was surprised to see a fax of my agreement, tweaked around to serve as a basis for this person’s relationship with his new VA. I was confused, thought that he accidentally faxed it to me instead of this other person, but as I looked at the very familiar agreement, my freakin’ fax number was left on there as the number to send the agreement back to. Kind of funny, right?

Well, what I didn’t find too funny was the price that this other VA was working for. It was less than half of my hourly rate, and I charge what I believe to be industry standard. There is no way a person can run a business for that type of money, not in North America. I don’t care that another VA got the project. I’m too busy to worry about that stuff. What does bother me, though, is that people charge such ridiculously low rates to land jobs. I think it does a great disservice to other newbies to the industry trying to make it by charging the rates that they need to charge to make a living.

I believe there’s a big difference between doing this as a job and running a VA practice as a business. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me, and I’m okay with it personally. I have clients that appreciate the fact that when you pay peanuts you get monkeys, so I’m doing just fine. I just hate that there isn’t a governing body or something to set a rock bottom rate for VAs to charge. I don’t know, is that a good idea or a bad idea? If everyone had to charge a minimum price it would at least put everyone on level playing ground. Am I just grumpy?

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I’m fairly new to Mozilla Firefox. If you haven’t heard of Firefox, or if you just haven’t switched yet, you might consider checking it out. It’s an open source (I believe) internet browser and I just love it. I started using Firefox about a year and a half ago, when I discovered their tabbed browsing feature - something that Microsoft’s Explorer has since implemented, but I have grown to love my Firefox.

Thing is…there are certain websites that I can’t access with Firefox because they don’t support any browsers besides Explorer. That really burns me…tee hee…get it? Firefox-burns me…anyway….

I really can’t believe that Top Producer is among the three sites in three days that I have been unable to access with Firefox. How frustrating! I don’t think there’s any good reason for it. If there is, I wish someone would enlighten me.

Is anyone else with me here?

And can anyone share their favorite Firefox features with me? I don’t use it to its full potential. I know it has lots of cool capabilities, but I haven’t really had the time to learn much about it.

I would love to hear what you do with your Firefox.

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I love writing. Love it. Love it, love it, love it. I’m proud to admit (sort of) that every thought I put down on paper is fresh content. Squeezed right from my own brain. This topic has been hashed and rehashed over and over in the virtual assistance world.  Tales of website plagiarism. One VA copying and pasting content right from another VA’s site. It happens ALL the time. Why? Why would someone want to have all of someone else’s ideas passed off as their own? Are these people just lazy? Don’t know any better? Think it’s flattering? Well it’s not.

Maybe these content stealers (How d’ya like that word? Brings me back to grade 3…) don’t think they’ll be caught. Maybe they don’t know about CopyScape. Maybe these people don’t realize that anyone can go to www.CopyScape.com and type in their url to find out if anyone has copied their content.

Well, the other day I typed in MannMadeTime.com at CopyScape and low and behold there was a match. Someone has copied and pasted, almost word for word, an article I wrote some time ago and have posted on my website.I’ve contacted this VA twice now, and have not received a response.  I was hoping I wouldn’t have to get nasty about it, but looks like I’m going to have to make a phone call or something.

My point is - check CopyScape regularly to see if you’ve been plagiarized.

And if you’re a plagiarizer - stop it. If you aren’t a good writer, hire someone to write your content. Don’t steal it from somebody else. You might be surprised at how inexpensive it is to hire someone to revamp or create from scratch, your web content. And once you’ve been labeled a plagiarizer among your peers (if you’re a VA, you should know VAs talk to each other…trust me) you might find out rather quickly that it doesn’t pay to take content that came from someone else’s head.

I’m done now.

Wow, I seem to be ranting a lot this week. Sorry ’bout that.

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If I get one more email that promises to make my girlfriend happier (you know the ones) I am going to throw something. By the time I finish typing this sentence, I’m sure there will be at least one new email for an anti-impotence drug sitting in my junk mail folder. Is there anyone that actually orders little blue pills after receiving emails like this?

“Oh Martha, look at the little note I got in that fancy internet box,” says Walter with a smile. “Says here I can please you better.”

“Oh, Walter,” giggles Martha, “Where do we stick our credit card in the internet machine?”

Seriously. Why do these spammers even bother? I don’t get it. Don’t these people have anything better to do with their time?

Besides the erectile dysfunction drugs and other ‘enhancement’ products I get emails for everyday, there are also tons of nice girls that want to chat with me. How lovely.

These emails mostly go straight to my junk folder, but then there are the other emails. The ones from scam artists.

The people that have fathers wrongly imprisoned and need you, their trusted friend, to accept a payment of 3 million dollars in your US bank account, blah blah blah.

There are other con artists about as well, some wanting you to send them money, some disguised as PayPal emails, and so on and so forth.

(If you ever get an email from ‘PayPal’ that doesn’t address you by name, or says your account has been suspended, or something else along those lines - NEVER take it as the truth. PayPal will always call you by name, never ‘PayPal customer’ or anything else. And they would call you about anything of a serious nature. If you have an email that looks suspicious, forward it to spoof@paypal.com and the real PayPal people will tell you if it’s bogus or not.)

Anyway, what inspired me to write this post was an email I received this morning.

It is a very brief message from someone asking some questions about how I accept payment from people located outside of the US, and where my offices are located. My first reaction was - sounds like a scam.

Isn’t that terrible? I’m preprogrammed to put everything under a microscope and analyze the heck out of it before I respond.

This could be a scam, but it might be legit. Who knows? I emailed him back and answered his questions concisely. Mind you, I Googled him first.

Jeeez…is everyone else this skeptical?

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There really isn’t a good reason, in this day and age, why a company will provide poor customer service. There are too many choices out there for consumers to deal with a company that has rotten service. Maybe I’m old fashioned in thinking that I would rather pay a little more for something if the company I’m buying it from will support their product and make me feel like a valued customer.

I’m going to share a story with you.

Every year, there is a big Christmas Craft Fair at the Civic Center in Charlottetown. I am not one for crowds and I usually stay away from large events with masses of human beings moving each other down aisles - not for me.

However, there is one vendor that brings me to that fair each year. (I won’t mention their name here.) It’s a place that makes personalized ornaments and I absolutely love them. They have become a part of the Christmas tradition in my new family. When my husband and I were engaged, we got an ornament personalized for our ‘1st Christmas’ together. The following year, when we were married, my sister-in-law gave us a personalized ornament from there with our wedding date on it. The next year, when we were expecting our first child we had ornaments made to announce the news to our families. I had an ornament made for me in honor of my pregnancy. The following year, we got our daughter’s ‘1st Christmas’ ornament from that vendor. The next year when we were expecting our second child, we had an ornament made, again, to announce the news to our families as well as a new family ornament with four snowmen - one representing myself, my husband, my daughter, and a ‘TBA’ snowman to represent the new baby.

That Christmas fair has come and gone. I didn’t make it because I was just too busy. It wasn’t until this past week I realized we didn’t get an ornament made for our new baby! This might sound trivial to some people, but it’s a big deal to me. This is a tradition that’s been going on since 2002! And what will Shelby think when there are ornaments to mark every other event in our lives except for her?! Talk about second child syndrome.

This company has no website. They’re in Nova Scotia - a neighboring province - so a trip over there to get one ornament is not an option. I called the company yesterday to see if they would be able to mail an ornament to me.

“No, we don’t do that,” was the answer I got.

“Really? And you don’t have a website or anything?” I said…panic in my voice…”But I have a story! This is part of our Christmas tradition! Do you know how important this is to me?” I thought…wondering if I told the girl this it would change her mind. But by the tone in her voice, I doubted it would matter.

“No. We don’t do anything like that. Sorry.” I wonder what the owner of that business would have said to me. I hope the conversation would have gone differently.

I can understand mail order could cause a lot of problems for a small business like this - especially during the holidays. However, think of how the sales could sky rocket! Couldn’t she at least have asked me what I needed? We could have worked something out. I could have described what I wanted, asked if it could be made up for me so I could have someone pick it up for me.

Instead, a paying customer was told “no we don’t do that” and that was it. I don’t think that’s acceptable. If you are a small business that creates gift items that could potentially be cherished collectible items, you should be more accommodating than that. If not, don’t bother going to fairs every year to get people hooked on you. Seriously.

I have contacted a fellow VA in Nova Scotia, Amanda Dugas, who has agreed to pick up an ornament for me. Thankfully I have a virtual friend willing to do me a favor.

I’m just steamed that I got such a cold, hard ‘no’ from a small business that gives me the warm and fuzzies every year when I decorate my Christmas tree.

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