You’ll be wanting an update on the rental post boxes. The source I’ve found has an interesting tale. He ran a rental box service up on Sherman and 441, so I may actually know the guy when we finally meet in the near future. He was up near Jerry’s thrift store. I’m the type that considers the most forms of self-employment (except salesmen) to have higher status than most jobs, so I listened closely to every detail.He gave me information of pricing and advertising. The boxes he’s got still have the manuals and installation instructions. Then he described what happened to his business. You know those center turn lanes we’ve got all over Florida? Well, town councils around here like to rip those out and put in hedges and trees, thinking it makes the streets classier. It also changes the traffic pattern and that bankrupted him. Come to think of it, we’ve got one of those lanes right past the front of our place.
He says that he may have thrown them out, but if he can find them, he’ll give me two interesting items. One is a POS (Point of Sale) program for the business and the other is, get this, a list of 2,000 of his old customers from this area. He reports most of them were steady, long-term payers. That would make my life very easy.
I got the perfect call-out this afternoon. Setting up a wireless router. The new ones (like D-Link) are self-configuring, but you still need a little technical savvy. Everything went perfect and I was able to upsell the client to new anti-virus software by showing him how far outdated his subscriptions were. Months and years out of date, and again, nobody told him you have to set these programs up and work them. Now I have money for the mailboxes.
Afterward, being near the beach, I dropped by for the last minutes of Arnel’s show. He’s now working 4 nights per week which is a lot of hard work. Then again, I don’t know how much I’d take on if I was playing tourist season on the beach. I’ll be using the upcoming week to catch up on my material, and to hopefully include a “Live Karaoke” one-hour set by the 17th. Arnel calls it “Solo-oke”. We have a lot of common ground that is reflected by how we have had to invent such new words to describe what we are up to because it is off the beaten track. Most local musicians never have to do that. Ever.
Arnel’s musical background is surprisingly similar to mine, although I would not go so far as to draw comparisons. For the first half of our lives, we were band musicians. That is, we always played with groups of musicians. As time went by, those musicians began to let us down and they slowly got replaced by electronic equipment as it became available. This progression continued until we became soloists, heavily dependent on backing tracks. In itself, this is interesting because as soloists, we cooperate and coordinate probably at least as much as any bands we’ve been in. And with our growing expertise in programming, I can see some day soon we will have customized backing tracks that will rival all but the finest live musicians around here. I’m talking “live” midi tracks sampled from the original recordings for an absolutely unbeatable sound.
Even more interesting is that Arnel was not a singer at first. I didn’t know that, because he does great imitations of Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash. Like myself, Arnel felt he needed other band members to perform, and even told me at first he didn’t think he could sing a solo act. I definitely didn’t know that, either. Sometimes I’m tempted to take another crack at learning guitar because for solo material, playing bass is definitely the more difficult route. But I’ve come too far with the bass and my show is unique, which is more important than being good. Drastically more important.
