Most Dangerous Object in the Office This Month: $2 Pocket Shots

Just what the office environment needs! Most Dangerous Object in the Office This Month: $2 Pocket Shots

What with all that's written about psycho, curmudgeonly, controlling, insecure, manipulative, ineffectual bosses; political, gossipy, insecure, unqualified co-workers; spouses of whatever gender who just don't understand and don't hold up their end of the bargain; children we thought we had to have to complete our lives who are just demanding, ungrateful, self-absorbed; and, finally, all those other people who make our lives difficult on a daily basis from the barista who cannot seem to get a coffee order straight to fellow commuters who are self-entitled beyond belief, I felt it was my honor-bound duty to provide the ultimate cure-all to all that's making you lose your aplomb, the $2 Pocket Shots.

Forget grieving over the demise of the three martini lunch! Who needs lunch anyway when you have $2 Pocket Shots? Skip that morning coffee and bagel and go straight for a Pocket Shot to start your day. All the office discussion about where to order lunch today getting you down? Just pop another $2 Pocket Shot and it won't matter. Got an afternoon of departmental meetings staring you in the face? Hmm, sounds like a double shot of Pocket Shots to me!

In the great tradition of surreptitious substance abuse at the office to get through the day, we bring you $2 Pocket Shots.

Or, you could just go into business for yourself and call your own shots!

A New School Year

It doesn't matter how many years it's been since I last sat in classroom. The arrival of September, officially heraled by Labor Day is the new year even more surely than January 1st. So, it is right and fitting, apropos, that we launch the first chapter of the new Private Label InterActive bright and early in September.

PrivateLabel Mail is changing names and will henceforth be known as Venntive. Nope, that's not a typo.

Venn is the name of an Eglish logician who introduced Venn diagrams (1834-1923). Venn diagrams are usually those overlapping circles with common shared areas, especially the center where all the circles overlap and share one common area.

Venn also happens to be Norwegian for a companion and equal, someone who knows and likes another person very well, or a person who acts in a friendly and generous way to people, etc. he or she does not know.

Over the years, PrivateLabel Mail has grown a very nice CRM (Customer Relationship Management) module that makes it unique among email marketing solutions as well as CRM solutions. It is truly a turnkey, pre-integrated, suite of tools that enable small companies to have an affordable, SaaS (Web-based) solution with CRM, sales forecasting, A/P and A/R, and enterprise-level email marketing tools.

We feel Venntive better describes what this great piece of software delivers. For those of you who are current clients using PrivateLabel Mail, nothing much changes for you except the name and the logo at the bottom of the broadcasts you send. We ask that you eventually transition over to logging in to your accounts at the new Venntive site, but the PrivateLabel Mail login remains in place.

If you have not explored all the tools that are included with your email marketing account, please email to schedule a phone conversation and a demo of all that you could also be doing with your account.

Summer In The City

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it'll be alright

And babe, don't you know it's a pity
That the days can't be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
In the summer, in the city

Cool town, evening in the city
Dressing so fine and looking so pretty
Cool cat, looking for a kitty
Gonna look in every corner of the city
Till I'm wheezing like a bus stop
Running up the stairs, gonna meet you on the rooftop

But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it'll be alright

And babe, don't you know it's a pity
That the days can't be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
In the summer, in the city

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

But at night it's a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it'll be alright

And babe, don't you know it's a pity
That the days can't be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
In the summer, in the city
From: Summer in the City
The Lovin' Spoonful
(John Sebastian - Mark Sebastian - Steve Boone)

Just got back from two brutally hot weeks in New York, specifically Manhattan. That is New York for me, but then, some would call me a snob about that among other things. Everyone was looking for a cool drink, including this guy hitting up the girls at a bar on Clinton St. on the LES. He probably had a greater level of success than most! Because, if you don't ask, you definitely won't get!

Serendipity is a wonderful thing and happily, I got to experience that on this trip, too.

I keep a really sweet 3-D Racing SS (that's single-speed to you!) bassboat red (don't know why it's called that, but it's a deep red w/ metal flecks that is just sexy gorgeous) at the NY apartment. Flat tires, old worn-out pumps and a resulting broken stem sent me to one of the coolest bike shops in the city, BikeWorks, located just off Rivington at 106 Ridge St., New York, NY 10002, (212) 388-1077. They're serious about cycling, closing on Wednesdays so they can do the track races out in the far reaches of Queens and on Sundays so they can go for a ride, too, like everyone else. They cater to the bike messenger community, fixies/single-speeds, but they love bikes and know how to treat the high-end, low-end, everything-in-between-end spectrum of bikes.

So, this aloof, tattooed chick wrencher takes my bike under her wing to make it all better. As we're talking, I'm thinking I know her, so I introduce myself first to get her name. Lo and behold, it is KT, a bike messenger I bugged until she would talk to me years ago riding across Houston St. (Bike messengers, like bike mechanics, are slightly loathe to mix with the general population of people on bikes.) I ended up loaning her a few $$ to take the ferry to Jersey to then ride to Philadelphia with a herd of messengers for the Bike Messenger Worlds after the week of Metropoloco in New York, summer of 2000.

As narrow as margins are in bike shops, she didn't hesitate to comp me for the new tube and the work without objection from Dan the Man. Good customer service! Good karma! Cool experience all the way around on a sweaty August afternoon.



KT's teaching wrenching to women each Monday evening in the basement at Times Up on E. Houston St. and I went to check it out. Full house, despite the heat and humidity.

She asked about GirlGroove.com. Seems every direction I turn, someone is reminding me that I need to relaunch this bike chick online mag. With a commitment from one of the best chick wrenchers in the US to write a regular column, I guess I'm going to have to take the plunge.

Stay turned for the re-launch in the near future as a Web2.0 blog thing.