A couple of guys cracked me up today.

First, let me explain that one of my websites offers full-page ads for widget stores by subscription.

The first guy contacts me about subscribing. I'm explaining to him things about the site, and he starts telling me how much traffic I'm getting. He's feeling pretty smug that he's found Alexa or something like it.

"So, you had a big jump in traffic in May, right?"

"Uh, no." I said. "Traffic peaks in March, then tapers off each month into the summer."

He wasn't convinced, and started rattling off other information about the site that his "secret source" gave him. I tried to explain how those sites are just guestimating (and doing a bad job of it), but to no avail.

Later in the day, I received an email from a store owner who had cancelled his subscription two years ago. For whatever reason he was upset that, if he searched on Google for his store's name, he found the store's ad on my site in the search results.

I tried to explain to him that Google still had a cached version of his ad, even though it's been two years, but that there was nothing in my database relating to his store.

This guy was in San Francisco back when Prodigy was king, and picked up some stuff about the internet through osmosis, I guess. He insisted that I get rid of all of the meta tags for his store.

I explained to him that there were no tags of any kind, and that if he wanted the ad out of Google's cache, he should contact Google.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's lesson from who knows who.