Haven't You Been Paying Attention?

The problem is that I think everyone checks my Facebook page daily. Or follows me on Twitter. Or at least visits my regular website — where you can view my calendar and watch my Twitter feed; which is synched to my salon Facebook page, so whatever I update the FB page with shows up as a "tweet."

So when someone tells me they didn't know something I have been updating about recently or were unaware of time I have scheduled off, or don't know that I don't work weekends, etc,. etc., I get all irritated that they haven't been paying attention.

I mean, really, these days, who isn't checking the Internet daily? And why aren't they checking my pages?

Oh well. I guess I'll get used to the idea that not everyone sees everything I post online every day. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect my clients to hang on my every Internet word.

But what about those instances where it would really make sense?

I have had a website for my business since 1999. And I have had the same URL for that website since 1999. And if you can't remember that my business name isn't "Nails by Maggie," I have that URL too. And it doesn't matter if you can't remember if it's .com or .org or .net — because I have them all. And even if you can't remember any of that, why wouldn't you just Google me?

And not just myself — I mean why wouldn't any client of any nail tech use the Internet to catch up to that tech? It always strikes me as odd when a client who hasn't been in in over a year sounds surprised to learn that I'm no longer at the location I was when they last saw me. It just seems like they would have checked the website during that time, I guess. But I can shrug that off easily enough. It's the people who find me after a decade or more and are so excited to discover that I'm still doing nails and am still in/back in Visalia — like I'm so hard to find! All they had to do was type in my URL — the same URL that I had the last time I saw them! Or at least try a Google search, right?

If they were really sitting around the house or the office looking at their flea-bitten, swap-meet excuse for nails, thinking "I sure wish I knew whatever happened to Maggie. She was the BEST nail-lady EVER!" — I would think they would simply also then think, "OH! I know! I'll Google her and see if she's still doing nails!"

But nope. They just hop from one unsatisfying nail salon experience to the next, watching cat videos on their iPhones instead of looking me up, waiting for serendipity to take them by the hand and lead them to my (new) doorstep.

Seems weird. In a world where Internet search engines now compete with personal referrals as the #1 source of new business for me, it just seems like people who claim they are already looking for me would be using the same methods as the people who've never met me.