Parts of my job. Stuff you don't care about, really, but it's part of my world.

1. Complaining and threatening. I have to call up companies like the internet provider and phone carriers to complain about poor service and mistakes; then threaten to drop them as my service provider if they don't do what I ask. Banks, too. What is usually necessary to accomplish this: being a longtime customer, and having a definite alternative to go to (and saying so).

2. Translating foreign language emails and guessing what they mean. Once it was just receipts from, say, a German domain registrar or software company, but now it involves using Google Translate to change Chinese characters into English words, then change those back again into Chinese pinyin, and then take some leaps of faith.

I recently have been dealing with Chinese who want to buy domain names. Sometimes their emails come in English, sometimes part in characters. I can translate those, but then when I answer an email I must try to avoid English words that have more than one meaning, and use words that are less easily mistakable. (Discovering the possible meanings of what in English were just odd syllables helped us to some sales. Lots of English domainers ignore emails originating with Chinese email providers like qq.com and 163.com, as if they were all spam. They're not.)

3. Allowing my personal finances to go to hell in order to protect the business. Borrowing from family and friends when desperate; depleting my savings when needed; selling my belongings sometimes. A few months there got pretty scary before it normalized. The new online business "normal" these days is much thinner, more ravaged and starving... and often located right next to a steep cliff.

4. Tolerating Google's imperious ways. I can turn on Private Browsing on this or that browser as much as I like, but Google still tracks every damn thing you do. Every time you open a new browser window and forget to make that one private too, they've got you and will start showing you (in Google Ads) words and images from your past, as if Google were the cheesiest and most transparent of fortunetellers.

Google has changed the rules and updated the way it ranks sites in unprecedented ways recently. This has thrown marketers and domainers into chaos, because no one has a clear idea of what their websites/domains are worth now. It's not really good to throw an entire industry into uncertainty as they've done.

And while I'm at it, I may as well snipe at the internet authority ICANN, which some time back authorized a whole truckload of new domain name extensions, like .this and .that. It was an open invitation to large companies to be able to apply for their own extensions, like .ford or .comcast or .exxon. The extension could also be made up; it didn't have to be their company name or anything.

It cost those companies about $150K per extension request, I think. Just a big money grab on ICANN's part. What this did was shake up Google rankings of current websites. Again, one of the biggest internet authorities is screwing up the internet and all commercial (and non-commercial) activity on it. What brainiac decided to do this move all at once? In the past, they adopted new domain extensions a few at a time, and the internet absorbed them slowly.