A Happy Ending

I went to create a Yahoo group for my shop. Our current website was down, and we needed to have an announcement forum. Dang! I found that the name of my shop was already taken in Yahoo groups. Curious, I took a look at the moderator, and he had a link listed, one of which was www.myshop'sname.org! MMMMrrrrrrr! (Marge Simpson disapproval murmur.) When I followed the link, I found it was a local party girl/stripper outfit, that sends exotic dancers to your frat or bachelor party!

So I freaked out. I started asking for advice. The lowdown on free advice was that if my shop's name was not trademarked (it is not, because a carpet-cleaning product holds that right) we were SOL. Pornographers were assholes, they warned, they are not likely to sell you a URL for a reasonable price.

It is not like I disapprove of this sort of thing. Looking over the arrangements for the dancers, it seemed like they were being protected and treated well. What sent me into paranoia was that it soon was discovered that the guy who owned the site and the Yahoo group, was a guy who, upon moving to Austin in September, was directed to my shop on a listserve that I subscribe to! We even had a pleasant exchange, because I complimented him on a piece of writing he did. So he was well aware of my shop and it's name, and our standing in the community. So why did he have to use OUR name in the URL for his titty dancers???? We suspected foul play, that he had some grudge against us. In my paranoia I even thought that the drawing of the girl on the front page looked a lot like me! And the headshot behind her looked like my biz partner. To make matters more dubious, it also was discovered that he DID have his own URL, and that he was using both to point to his website!

A friend and member of the pagan community of some importance approached him, with a much cooler head, on our behalf. And guess what? The guy was unaware of the mixup, it was a mistake caused by him rearranging his web business, he took the stripper site down immediately, apologized to us personally and in a public forum with explanations, and gave us the URL as a goodwill gesture!

As I always say, "When in doubt, freak out!" to which my business partner replies, "Panic now, avoid the rush!"