Word Handler is MDG Writing Services turning over a new leaf, and exchanging its previously perhaps overly formal image for a better-rounded one, since commercial words aren’t the only words we can handle. We still do business writing, and still make it as austere as the client desires, but there’s much more written communication in the world today than was dreamt of in our original philosophy.   We aim to help with, if not all of it, certainly much of it. Many are the blog posts which would benefit from a virtual blue pencil.

Also being relaunched is the/my/our non-blog, formerly at mdgpundit.com, and now relocated to be part of the business site it was always intended to advertise. Although I fancy that I (I being Word Handler’s writer-in-chief Mark Guenette) have something to say which might be of interest to other people, the impetus for starting mdgpundit.com was to provide samples of the quality and kind of work which prospective clients could expect from MDG Writing Services.

The folly of one’s ways is easier to notice in retrospect, and, when the decision was made to rebrand ourselves, I realized how just plain dumb it had been to put the writing samples anywhere but on the business site. When I took a last look at mdgwritingservices.com, I couldn’t even find the link to mdgpundit.com. No wonder the latter wasn’t overflowing with ranting trolly comments about my severe criticism of Vivien Leigh’s performance as Scarlett O’Hara. (The not-as-yet controversial essay about Gone with the Wind has been salvaged, and is reproduced here.)

Of course the writing samples should have been placed inside the business site, as is now the case. I don’t know what I had been thinking.

I probably hadn’t been thinking at all, as, whenever it came time to do anything with the old site, the old host, and the latter’s “website builder tool”, my brain would shut down, likely as a defense mechanism. Attempting to do anything with mdgwritingservices.com inevitably put me at severe risk of a compound cerebral aneurism, if that’s the medical term for having your brain explode and shoot out both your ears.

I’m omitting the name of the old hosting company to protect the guilty (I’m not even going to say that their name rhymes with “ablutions”), but my experiences with them were truly horrific. A few weeks ago, I discovered that my site had been down for several days. I contacted the help (a gross misnomer) people, and was placed on a circular wild goose chase, from hold to the wrong person and to hold again, which, after two days, returned me to the same extremely incompetent individual at whom I’d screamed 48 hours previously. (When someone is of no help whatsoever, then asks whether they’d answered all your questions today, the only valid human reaction is to scream. I can assure everyone that I am not a man of violent temper, but even my remarkably good nature has its limits.

I then took the decision I ought to have taken years previously, and which was easy to take now that I was beyond the term of the three-year contract-in-a-poke I’d purchased after old hosting company was strongly recommended to me by someone who might not have been the best person to ask about such things. I avoided the incipient compound aneurism on my last phone call with the wretches by hanging up right before my brain exploded, and decided that it was time for a change. And, while I was making a change, I figured it might just as well be a big one.

Thus it was farewell MDG Writing Services, and hello Word Handler. (I’ll admit that was not my first choice for a name, but I was darned if I were going to give in to a shakedown for two thousand bucks to the unscrupulous characters who’d taken possession of that first choice. A little work with the thesaurus and I believe I came up with a name which describes what we do even better than the name for which I would have had to pay the protection racket.) I’ve put myself into the hands of WordPress, which is a somewhat known quantity, as mdgpundit.com had been a WordPress site. So far, so good. Actually, so far, better than I’d thought. It would have been nice had I been told that the text would literally fall into place once I pushed “publish” (in contrast to our previous host, it is now possible to find the “publish” button), but that is what appears to have happened. Perhaps my not having been told was the result of dealing with an actually helpful “help” person who didn’t speak fluent Half-a-Centenarian.

I feel less in danger of that compound cerebral aneurism with this new name and its new setting. Perhaps that’s a harbinger of good things to come.

Word Handler is now open for business and ready to serve you.