I’m running low on some of the imported poppers, so I want to encourage anyone who wants them to order them now. The shipping time when I reorder them from my European supplier can take a couple weeks. And, I always wonder if the shipment is going to get held up in Customs somehow, maybe delayed, maybe worse.

Anyhow, today I am almost out of White Snow, Zap, and Eagle. These have been very popular, so if you want them, order them now.

I’ve wanted to write something about my partner and me. The photo shows the two of us a couple of years ago, when we were still living in San Diego. Freddie is in front – with the full head of hair! – and I’m in back.

We’ve been together five and a half years. At the time we met, Freddie was living in a little City Heights apartment with his dog, and I was in my enormous empty house in Golden Hill. My ex had moved out a few months before. I had two invisible roommates – they’d each rented extra bedrooms and came and went at odd hours, keeping mainly to themselves. We met in October and were instantly inseparable; by February we’d moved in together.

Freddie’s a long-term HIV survivor. Having taken the test when it first came out, he’s been positive ever since anyone ever was positive. And yes, he’s had the whole gamut of treatments and regimens from AZT to XYZ.

Freddie also has had Type 1 diabetes since he was 12 years old. This is a more important factor in shaping his life than the HIV. As an HIV-positive person, Freddie is healthy. As a diabetic, Freddie is “brittle” and has ups and downs, has been in comas, and has been hospitalized as recently as three months ago. It’s odd that the various symptoms of the two diseases and the side effects of their treatments are sometimes the same: Neuropathy. Heart Disease. Kidney Disorders. Extreme persistent fatigue.

I’m writing this around two in the afternoon, and Freddie is upstairs asleep. He had a “reaction” – an episode of extremely low blood sugar — last night and another this morning. He’s tired and needs to rest. And I’m catching up on work and taking care of business.

I’m lucky, very lucky, that I have an opportunity to work from home, run my own business, and set my own schedule. I handle everything for this web site. I also do programming on a freelance basis for a number of other web sites. We’re scraping by, financially, but doing o.k. And most important, I have this amazing luxury of time and freedom to care for the people and things that are most important.

But it’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity. We’re not just making a living. We’re living a life.

This just in from a customer:

Your Copany is absoultey superior..packges are always well sealed and interior units are always wraped..not just stuffed inside..delvered to CA in two DAYS:)

I’m always thrilled to get this sort of feedback. It makes my day. FWIW, all I do is treat people the same way I expect to b e treated when I’m a customer. I work on GayHankies.com Monday through Friday, just like any other business.

If you place an order one day, I’ll process it the next business day. I might even process it the same business day, if you place it early enough in the morning before I run my credit-card batch, print shipping labels, prepare the packages, and get them in the mail. What’s early enough? Place your order by 9 or 10 a.m. Central Time and the odds are — if your credit card is good and your products are in stock — it will go out the same day.

Every once in awhile, this schedule doesn’t happen. I might be taking my partner to the doctor, or the dogs to vet, or I might be sick myself. I almost always can still get your orders out by the last mail pickup.

Very rarely, I’m really away. Out of town. Or taking a few days off. Or evacuating because of a hurricane. When that happens, you’ll know about it. I’ll post a notice on the web site where you can’t miss it.

I’ll write about the packaging another time. Gotta run to the mailbox and to take my partner up to Houston for a medical thing. And that’s another future subject.

I had an email this morning from a customer in Korea who wanted to buy poppers. Could he order them, he asked, and would there be problems getting them through customs?

The answer to the second question is “maybe” and that’s why the answer to the first question is “no.”

When I started this business back in the Fall of 2003, I started shipping anything to anyone who wanted to buy it. Poppers to Holland. JLube to Spain. You get the idea. After awhile, I realized that shipping things to other countries was not always profitable, and sometimes caused a lot of hassle and expense. Because my formula for shipping-costs was based on price, not weight, I usually found that International orders were heavy enough that I lost money on shipping. So I changed the formula and raised the International shipping cost.

Another issue was the customs forms and packaging required extra time for handling. Then there was the extra time of making a special trip to the Post Office and standing in line to hand the package to a clerk, in person. I couldn’t just drop these packages in the mailbox like many of our US shipments. So I did that, and adjusted the International shipping cost again.

But then I found that shipments outside the US started to get delayed or rejected in Customs. A package of poppers sent to Amsterdam (of all places!) was confiscated; the same thing happened with some sent to Canada. Although I had successfully shipped orders to fifteen countries outside the US, poppers were increasingly becoming a problem.

Last summer and fall I found that almost every non-US order for poppers was failing to be delivered. After long delays, orders shipped to Germany, Mexico, and Brazil were returned with the notation that they’d been rejected by Customs or the Post Office. I had to make refunds to the customers. They were left unsatisfied, and so was I. At that point, I realized that a change in policy was needed: Aside from the costs, there was too much uncertainty to continue trying to ship poppers outside the US.

I recently added some programming code which prevents orders containing poppers for a non-US shipping address from being completed on the web site. I feel badly that I can’t continue serving all my customers around the world – although I’m still happily shipping JLube to Spain.

If you live in Korea or Brazil or Mexico and you want to buy poppers I can’t help you, or at least, I can’t ship them directly to you. But if you have a friend in the US, I could ship them to your friend; how they get from your friend to you is up to you to work out.

I’ve always been enchanted by Holland’s capital, or at least, by the idea of it. I’ve never had a chance to visit there.

Here’s another reason to love it. We’re told these interesting traffic pylons are scattered all over the city — marked “XXX” no less.

An issue came up yesterday on a customer’s order that I see from time to time. It happens about every four to six weeks or so. The situation is that the customer says he entered his credit card information, but the web site is telling me that he chose to send in a check or money order. When the order has this “check or money order” flag set, there is no credit card information for me to process. I send the customer an email to remind him to mail me his payment, he writes back that I was supposed to run it through on his credit card, I write back that I didn’t get his credit card info, and we go back and forth. There’s a delay in processing the order, and — in the worst-case scenario — the customer may get frustrated and decide to shop elsewhere.

Typically what causes this is that after entering his credit card information, the customer accidentally clicks on the “radio button” (one of these:
) next to the section that says “pay by check or money order”. He doesn’t realize that he’s done it. And, he doesn’t notice that the next page — the one that says “check everything and make sure it’s correct” — says that he’s paying by check or money order. And, if he receives and reads his order confirmation email, he doesn’t notice that it also says that he is paying by check or money order and that it gives him the mailing address for the payment.

I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming the customer. There’s a saying in business, and you’ve probably heard it: “The customer is always right.” That doesn’t mean that the customer is always literally correct. It does mean, among other things, that if the customer has a problem, it’s up to the business to solve it if it wants the customer to remain a customer. In my case, I’m going to review the programming for the payment page to see if there’s a way to make it catch this sort of situation and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Fortunately, yesterday’s customer was very understanding, and after we exchanged emails he re-entered his order, I got his credit card info, and everything was fine after that. I’m mailing his package today.

Seen on Dictionary.com, the Word of the Day for Wednesday April 5, 2006: cum. We immediately thought of the Urban Dictionary.

I don’t know how many of my customers realize that GayHankies.com is a small home-based business. Almost everything that happens, happens in the spare bedroom at the back of my house which my partner and I usually call “the office.”

“The office” has a closet full of cock rings, dildos, lubes, and other toys, and there is a small refrigerator where I keep the poppers. Just anticipating your next question, no, I don’t think they really have to kept refrigerated. However, “the office” is very sunny, with windows on the east, south, and west. Temperatures in there easily get up into the 80s in the summer, even with the a/c blasting in the rest of the house. It’s easier to keep them in a cool dark place, just like you would store potatoes — except that a house like this on the Gulf Coast has no such thing as a cool dark place. But I digress…

There’s a PC and a laser printer in the office, and a whole bunch of shipping supplies scatterred around. I have a file cabinet with a couple months’ worth of filing piled on top, and a FAX machine that I use as a copier. Are you getting the idea now that I operate on something of a shoestring? Or should I say, a bootlace?

The most important thing in the office is a love seat where the dogs come up and keep me company when I’m working. We have two West Highland White Terries — Westies. They like to sit on the love seat and either watch me work, watch out the window (Westies Alert! Squirrels! Birds!) or sleep. Sometimes when I’m working on web site orders, accounting, paperwork, or what-have-you, they’ll run up to me and bark, demanding kisses and attention.

I don’t have coffee breaks. I have puppy breaks.

I’ve decided to add a blog to the GayHankies.com online store, and (drumroll, please) this is the first post.

Why am I doing this? First, I want to have more and better opportunities to communicate with my customers. I want to tell them about things happening with the store, and learn from their comments how I can serve them better and improve the store. Second, I want to increase the visibility of the store. Maybe if I write something interesting, someone will think reading the blog will become an end in itself, aside from just shopping at the store. And maybe some of the posts will get links, bring in more site visitors, and improve the store’s search engine rankings. (Yes, there is a method to this madness…)

More than all that, I really just want to write. Because my consulting work is declining these days, I find that I have extra time on my hands. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’ve been planning to return to it for years. A long time ago I considered trying my hand at short stories, but I never could get started. Then, with the rise of the Internet and the blogging revolution, I’ve started and abandoned blogs at least two or three times. The problem was, unlike in school days, there was no longer anyone standing over me saying “Write me 1500 words about x by next Wednesday.” And it never got done.

Now, I hope that working with the store I can start to draw on my daily and weekly experiences to provide something to write about. And, with a little luck, that might get enough creative juices going to get me writing other things, too. Stay tuned…