I’ve been offline for several days because of Hurricane Ike.  About a year and a half ago my partner and I moved fifty miles inland from our former home on Galveston Island.  At our new home in suburban Houston, we are still severely affected by the hurricane, having gone four days without power, but we are fortunate enough to have had no damage to our house and only minor damage to our yard and fences.  So many of our neighbors, both close by and in the greater Houston/Galveston region, were not so lucky.

Now that our power is back I will be getting GayHankies.com back up and running again as soon as possible.  Thank you all, very much, for your patience and support during this time.

If you can, I urge you to support the following charities which are doing a tremendous service to our region:

• Greater Houston Community Foundation – Houston Ike Relief Fund
• Salvation Army Hurricane Respon – Delivering One Million Meals to Ike Victims, on top of One Million Meals to Victims of Other Hurricanes in 2008
• American Red Cross – Operating 144 Shelters in Texas and 19 Shelters in Louisiana for Ike Evacuees

It’s five years now since I opened GayHankies.com, and I want to celebrate! Take a look at my Fifth Anniversary Sale. I hope these savings will make you feel like celebrating and having some fun, too. You’ll find specials on some of your favorite poppers and lubes, and there’s some condoms on sale, too.  Specials are good through October 31, 2008.

As always, every order qualifies for free shipping! Spend sixty dollars or more and I’ll upgrade your free shipping so your package comes by Priorty Mail.

Yesterday afternoon I heard from a customer who let me know that I’d shipped his package to the wrong address.  As soon as I saw his email, I stopped what I was doing and looked into it.  Sure enough, I made the mistake, and he had missed out on two bottles of Jungle Juice.

I make a lot of mistakes, actually, more than my family, friends, clients, and past co-workers realized.  I’ve always told people that I’ve learned more from my mistakes than from the anything I do right.  You can’t learn anything from being perfect all the time.  Yes, I was one of those irritating people who made all A’s except for two B’s in college.  That’s another story.

Then I joined the workforce all those years ago, and I found that “real life” was a lot more complex than the classroom.  And I learned to welcome every mistake, however painful, admiting them immediately and then making corrections.  Or even better, I learned to tell my boss, “Look, I made this mistake and I corrected it, and now the program is better than it was…”  I got a reputation as a problem-solver and fix-it man, but all of that came with the knowledge that finding a solution sometimes meant trying ten different solutions — all of them wrong — and then trying the one that worked.

Fast forward years later, and now I work by myself, for myself, in my own home-office.  And I’d made a mistake, and this customer didn’t get what he should have had.

Once I had a chance to figure out what happened, I contacted the customer, apologized, and told him I would send him replace product in the morning.  He doesn’t know it yet, but I’ve sent him a little something extra in his package to emphasize how sorry I am and to make up for his trouble.

So all’s well that ends well.  Until next time.