Saying Good-Bye - A Letter to Those Who’ve Walked With Us
Over the years, my wife Jodell and I have owned and operated several businesses. Some of the names you might recognize include The PC Cafe & Service Center, Bookkeeping Etc., Park Street Rentals, Frugal Hosting & Design, The Service Center, Abricom Systems, and Amerilake Incorporated. Although each served a different purpose, there was one common thread through them all: helping people and organizations function better, dream bigger, and feel supported along the way.
So if you’ve landed on this page, there’s a chance you might have crossed paths with one of our companies over the past few decades. Maybe you were a client, a colleague, a vendor—or someone walking into a town office, library, medical clinic, or business whose systems we had the privilege of designing, installing, or maintaining.
Maybe you visited one of the websites we built, or sat down at a workstation in a little internet café we opened. Or maybe you stepped into a freshly cleaned church that our team helped maintain. However our paths may have crossed—or even if you were simply helped by one of the organizations we supported—I want to say a heartfelt, thank you.
And to those of you who have never heard of any of those names, I still want to welcome you in. Because the story I’m about to tell isn’t just about businesses. It’s about people. It’s about service. It’s about community.
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of serving a wide range of clients—from small business owners, real estate agents, and independent doctors, to larger clinics, libraries, churches, nonprofits, and municipalities. Our work reached into law enforcement agencies, factories, and even Delta Airlines. And yet—some of our most meaningful moments came from helping everyday individuals and families just trying to keep the family computer running long enough to finish a project, submit an application, or file those dreaded taxes.
No matter who we served, or what the job required, I always believed in offering more than just a service. I believed in showing up fully—with compassion, with intention, and with care.
And that’s why, when I became seriously ill with COVID-19 in December of 2019—and then as the world began shutting down around us—everything seemed to come crashing down. My own recovery took months before I could simply walk the length of our house without feeling dizzy, short of breath, or needing to sit and wait for my heart to settle. And yet, as hard as the physical toll was, the emotional and financial exhaustion ran even deeper and having COVID was a breaking point—a final straw, so to speak, after a lifetime of compounding hardships. So with grief in our hearts and the realization of how long recovery was going to take, in 2020 my wife and I made the incredibly painful decision to shut everything down and file for personal bankruptcy. I emphasize that it was a personal bankruptcy because I was determined to still honor my commitment to each of the clients we had contracts with at the time. People who had trusted us over the years. So as difficult as recovery was I still poured what strength I had left into honoring our contracts and wrapping up our business relationships with dignity, and making sure our customers knew they still mattered. My thinking was that if I ever crossed paths with these clients again, I wanted it to be a positive interaction rather than a reminder of failure.
So before I close this letter, I just want to say a heartfelt thank-you—to each and every person, business, and organization that ever trusted us to help them over the years. Your trust, your encouragement, and your partnership meant more than you probably ever knew.
Little did I realize at the time, but even in the midst of all that loss and uncertainty, God was already planting the seeds for what would come next. I didn’t know it yet, but He did. And in the years that followed, that quiet beginning would become what is now Alderpen Media, Inc.
If you’re curious to know more about that journey—or want to better understand the lifetime of compounding challenges that brought us to that crossroads—you’ll find links below to a book I’ve written and several articles that share more of the story.
Whether we’ve known each other for decades or you’re just now discovering this page, I’m genuinely glad you're here. And I hope that in some small way, you can find encouragement in seeing that no matter what struggles you’ve faced, God can carry you through it.
With gratitude,
George Benson
Founder, Alderpen Media, Inc.
#TheHomeWorkDad