Textbooks Again

Well apparently my secretary succeeded in extracting a textbook from the salesperson. Two actually—an 8th edition (which I already had) and a 9th.

Now I'm moving forward to the next course. What book? There's one I like! Simple, easy to figure out, and covers all the bases nicely! Only about ¼ inch thick.

Fifty-three dollars? (OK—Amazon wants a lot less, but the college bookstore will go with the list price.)

Now you know why I normally do all the rhetoric in online posts.

College Textbooks

I just had the runaround with Pearson Higher Ed (a textbook publisher). I usually don't use printed textbooks, but this summer is a literature course and more than one student has said that a printed book (rather than online) would help.

Now I would think that Pearson would be glad to be helpful to me. After all, I'm an unpaid sales representative for their company. I'm delivering them an $1800 sale without any real effort on their part. All they have to do is cooperate.

All I want is a desk copy of the textbook so I can make assignments. I went to their website. I need to register to do anything whatsoever. When I enter my e-mail address, I discover that I'm already registered. They send me a cunning little 31-letter code. I enter it. Now I need my password. I only use two different passwords for sites like this one, so I try one, then the other. Neither works. I look for customer service. All of the customer service links require that password. Finally I find the tech rep live chat. Yes, he can help me. No, I don't really exist in the system. All I have to do now is phone the sales person and have a chat with her. Then she'll give me the magic word that will enable me to sell their product to my students.

I'm seriously rethinking the whole idea of using this overpriced ($98) book.

Unexpected Benefit

I was pondering the church change this afternoon. My reasons for changing were sort of an accumulation of things—yes, there was a smoking gun, but there was also an accumulated weight of straws trying to break this camel's back. I wasn't expecting much from St. Matthew's though. About all I could foresee was attending every Sunday, quietly listening and participating, then slinking quietly back to my apartment.

That's not what happened.

The first couple of Sundays I discovered that several coworkers were in the congregation, that someone thought I'd be just great in the choir (haven't responded to that one yet) and that I was really welcome there.

St. Matthew's has an odd idea about volunteers. Grace Fellowship sees volunteering as a lifetime commitment, but at St. Matthew's a person can volunteer to do something once in a while. That means that there's essentially no screening process for someone to read a Bible verse. For another thing, the St. Matthew's question is whether the volunteer can do the work, not whether the volunteer is spiritually ready to do it or needs emotional validation. That's why I'm doing the St. Matthew's website but wasn't allowed to do the GFC website. I can do websites. That's a vote in my favor in Ashland, but a vote against me in Mansfield. The main reason Ashland wanted me to do a website was to get a website; in Mansfield, the main reason would be to make me some sort of officer—for a lifetime—of the church.

One Episcopalian oddity is that it takes an enormous number of people to make things happen, and there are always openings in the cadre of volunteers. On any given Sunday, we need at least someone to read the Bible, someone to help with communion, a couple of people to pass the offering plates, and someone to put the after-church meal together. Then there are the ushers, the Sunday school teacher (only a few kids), and the people who clean the church. And the choir. If we had a few teenagers, we'd have torch-bearers, too. Grace gets along just fine with a couple of ushers. Yes, there are musicians, the PowerPoint person, the announcement reader, and the coffee person, but those tend to be lifetime jobs, not available for casual volunteers.

So the surprise is that the structure is incredibly permeable. There's a way for people to start being part of things almost immediately.

If you build it

The St. Matthew's website is now really finished. I spent most of Saturday getting it nailed down, and I think it's beautiful (and two or three friends agree).

Now the issue is Google (and Bing and Yahoo). Google apparently reindexes everything about every two weeks, and until that, we're stuck on the bottom of page six. They all have methods of submitting websites for consideration, but I think that's only a device to make the audience feel better. It doesn't seem to speed up the indexing process at all.

So now I get depressed, obsessively check the traffic reports, and try to tell myself that it's going to be OK. All that work and no result! Blogs have a very easy way to tell how much traffic (and where it comes from). I'm usually the only one who has looked at the church blog. (or this one)

Anyhow, my goal is to get the church somewhere on the first two pages if someone searches for "church ashland ohio" and at the top of the first page if someone searches for "episcopal church ashland ohio". Currently the denomination beats us. A listing of wedding fees beats us. An old newspaper article about which churches local politicians attend beats us.

I'm hoping to hit that goal by August 1 to catch people who might be moving to town to take new jobs. That gives me about 3½ months, which is about seven passes for reindexing. Google is incredibly specific, weird, and inscrutable about the characteristics that take one to the top of a list, but I've got seven tries to figure it out.

The last indexing was twelve days ago, so I'm hoping to see some results this week.