Planet Crimson

This year has FLOWN by! Holy crap! My little store has grown from a fledgling newbie to closing the year with a little over $93k in GROSS income! Now, mind you, almost all of that was cost of goods sold and expenses, and if you count the debt, then it was definitely NOT a profitable year, but I did survive the first year so that’s a huge milestone. This next year will either mean big growth and change or it will mean crashing and burning. Most of that will depend on the “poker war” that I am in the middle of. Most of you don’t know much about what I’m deep into, but let’s just say that I’m participating in a little civil disobedience in order to get back some rights. There’s a major misconception out there that poker is gambling, rather than a skill game, and I’m part of the fight to get poker recognized for the intellectual sport that it is. The recent actions of the Department of Gaming are showing me how well we’re doing.

My goals for this month are to get two days off per week (I know, shock and horror!), and to start making some headway into the debt of the business. I have to replace two of my dealer chairs (Basically I bought two of two types of chairs so I need to get to 4 of the ones that they like the best), and I need to get an upgraded door locking, remote unlocking system to improve our nighttime security and those are my only expenses forecasted this month. Alex and I have worked out a deal where he works Fridays and Saturdays every week and those are the only days we’re open for retail sales except that on Tuesdays when we have a daytime game people can come in and buy stuff if they want but it’s not an advertised day.

Also, my laptop broke a few nights ago. The hard drive went completely bonkers and I nearly lost a lot of important documents and forms I had created for the business. Charles was able to salvage a lot of the most important files, but I lost other ones. He worked really hard getting a new (bigger) hard drive in there, as well as working around a problem with my CD/DVD drive (which apparently may also need replacing) to get the operating system installed again. I’ve set back up a few of my frequently-used programs, but not all of them just yet. I’m so so thankful to Charles for all his work, because I don’t really have the time or patience to deal with hardware issues anymore.

Anyway, Mom and the kids are going to be in town soon and I need a shower, so I’m going to end this post rather abruptly and go take care of that. There’s a whole lot more I could blog about but I’ll have to save it for another time.

I set up something to post to Twitter when I make a new blog post, but I can’t remember what it is. I have a new plugin that can do it, and I’d rather it does it, but I can’t remember what I am using that I need to disable!

So weird…

Update: I figured it out! I was using a website called TwitterFeed that was doing it. I disabled that so now it will use my local plugin that pushes to Twitter faster.

I’m sitting at my store waiting for Alex to show up to cover for me so I can get more than 3 hours of sleep. I could have managed on the 3 hours, but since everything and everyone is pissing me the fuck off, I figured I should probably not try to get through the day like this. Fortunately, the two employees I feel the most comfortable leaving alone together are here tonight so I plan to sleep my face off and let them run the show.

Speaking of them, I lost one of my favorite dealers. It’s kind of a long story, but he’s not feeling well and isn’t dealing with his need for time off in a mature or respectful fashion, so I have no choice but to replace him. I’m divying up his schedule among a couple part-timers so that we have lots of coverage and backup. It makes me sad to have to do it, because this guy is really good at his job and he’s a hard worker. I don’t really know what the heck is going on with his personal life but I hope he figures it out.

I’m kind of at that “next stage” with the business where I have hit that one-year mark and things are busy enough here that I need to make sure the basics are rock solid. It seems like I’m always in flux and nothing is ever “business as usual”. I have learned what types of people I should hire although they can still throw things at me that surprise me.

Anyway, Alex is here to cover for me so I’m gonna go home and get some more sleep. Peace out!

Some people seem to believe that I haven’t done anything to prepare for Thanksgiving…

What they don’t realize is that I’ve literally been working on it for a month. One day away from the store on what could potentially be a really busy night is a terrifying prospect.

It started off with the person who normally “runs shit” while I’m gone having other plans and my preferred replacement not being “up to speed” yet. (He is now, but he wasn’t a month ago) So, I arranged to have me and him ready for it and then the other guy apparently reorganized his schedule and didn’t tell me (oops). So, back to plan A. I also had to make sure the other Thursday dealer was still going to work (he is), and arrange for an on-call dealer who lives relatively close to be sober and ready to come in when and if he’s needed.

Then, over the last month or so while we’ve gotten so much busier, a lot of minor but important issues came up (general issues with regards to how we operate and do our jobs) and I worked for at least 3 weeks to try and schedule a meeting with all my dealers’ crazy schedules and driving distance and I finally managed to pull one together at almost the zero hour Tuesday evening. I had them all meet me at a McDonald’s a mile away so we could have privacy away from customers and distractions. We used Subway last time but it was kinda crowded in the booths so we opted for something larger. Of course, to use the space I naturally bought stuff for everyone who wanted anything and bought myself dinner that I didn’t end up getting to eat and had to throw away because cold McDonald’s is eew. Also, our daytime game didn’t break at 5-ish like I expected it to, so Alex had to deal to them while we were gone because it was really important to me to have everyone there.

So, we rushed through all the content I had in an hour, punctuated by the manager making us all move our cars for their delivery truck when I had like 30 minutes of content left and 10 minutes to do it in. We hit everything we could and the dealers for the evening rushed back to the store to get things started.

So, I am paying one of my dealers for an entire night of work so that (hopefully) I can rest up to do Black Friday retail sales with Alex. (If it doesn’t turn out to be too busy, I might take a nap to prepare for what should be a busy Friday night) I seriously doubt I’ll be in any condition to work during the day on Saturday, so hopefully Alex will be doing that so I can catch up on the sleep I’m losing on Thursday and Friday.

And all this for a little turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes.

Also, Alex installed a new shelf in my storage room to make better use of the space and the weight we put on the shelves, and he installed the “ass gasket” aka toilet seat cover dispenser on the wall in my bathroom so the ladies won’t be so grossed out by the guys who can’t seem to aim into the damn bowl and leave pee and pubes on the toilet seat. Thanks again, shifty eyes!

So, I took my car into the Midway Nissan service department this morning to get a list of things taken care of. Since the online thing fucked up my service appointment, I was basically a walk-in and the first service adviser available, Jeff Duncan, greeted me. I told him the list of stuff I needed done, including:

- routine maintenance (oil change, tire rotation, inspection)
- tires inflated (I told him specifically that because it’s colder now, my tire pressure dropped, and he remarked at how smart I am to know that because most people think their tires are leaking when that happens - this is important to mention)
- my moon roof hasn’t worked in like 8 months, since last time I took it in - I’ve had one issue after another with the moon roof since I bought the minivan
- my rear DVD screen works itself loose from the latch and hangs half-open. I didn’t have a lot of high hopes that they’d actually do anything about this one…
- some molding on my sliding door pops off
- needed to talk to the collision department about fixing the backup sensor that the old guy damaged when he backed into me

So, I took the “shuttle” (which was actually a minivan driven by the slowest old lady driver ever) back home, slept all day, then got picked up at about 4:30 by the fastest old man driver ever. I waited forever for my service adviser to meet me (he had to be re-paged) and then got my paperwork which said I owed like $68 for the service. Um, no, I was ready for that and I produced documentation that I purchased the executive plan that covers routine maintenance for 3 years. So, got the charges reduced to 0.

Then, I asked him if they got the moon roof fixed. He said that it wasn’t broken (!) and perhaps I was not aware that there are two buttons to open it. Now, I refer you back to the fact that he was impressed that I knew the relatively-simple reason why all my tires need inflating. Now, he’s telling me that he thinks I’m so stupid that I have been pressing the wrong lever for 8 months. Like I haven’t tried both of them, like I can’t read one that says “tilt” and one that says “open”.

But, sure enough, we get in my car and the fucking thing opens right up, which I haven’t seen it do in 8 freaking months. So, I think the guy who was working on my car did find what was wrong and fixed it but maybe he didn’t think what he did was significant so he decided he couldn’t reproduce the problem. He also couldn’t reproduce the problem with the DVD screen falling down so I’m fucked on that one too. At least they are replacing the molding on my sliding door. But, he didn’t talk to the collision department and he didn’t get the paint protection re-applied. I knew I should have taken care of that myself.

His whole attitude when I came to pick up my car was piss poor. He was very distracted and couldn’t wait to get rid of me. He will be getting poor marks on his survey, I can tell you that.