Working

Haven't blogged for a while. Not because I haven't had anything to say, but because I haven't had the energy to do so. I've been pretty wiped out lately because I've been working a lot.

A few weeks ago one of my co-workers, Jennifer, left to go do some student teaching. Good for her, bad for us. Our company does quite a bit of e-bay sales in addition to our storefront and nationwide phone orders. Here's how that system has always worked. John (the co-president) photographs the items, describes them and launches them on e-bay. Then the items come to me and I check the listings, making sure the items are correctly described and all the numbers match, and then I organize them by launch date and stock number. Once the items are sold, Jennifer processes their payment through Paypal, sets up all the shipping info and puts them on the mailing desk where Nikki ships them off.

So clearly someone needed to take over Jen's part of this equation. And clearly said person is me. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind doing it, and now that I've got the hang of this job (after making a few costly mistakes of course) I kind of like it. But here's the thing. Jen and I had always worked on this stuff independently, yet simultaneously. Now that she's gone I have to find time to do it all.

And that's the key to the whole thing. Time. We launch anywhere from 10-30 new auctions at a time on e-bay, often three days a week. The auctions are, of course all timed, to about a week or so, though sometimes it's a little longer. So as some are going up others are selling and need to be processed. Once an item has been sold, it's supposed to go out within 48 hours. All while double checking the new stuff that just launched. It's a lot to keep up with, and when you add in the fact that I'm also still in charge of watch batteries and repair, and inventory of all of the
.999 product in the vault, oh, and waiting on customers all day, you can see how complex my days have become. My workload has essentially doubled.

So the only way to really get a jump on this stuff is to create more time to complete the tasks. In a business such as ours the open and close times have to be pretty strictly observed for security reasons. So I am now arriving at 7:00 a.m. in order to have an hour to get things done before the doors open. I already stay until 5:00 p.m. when we lock the vault and leave. This happens about 3-4 days a week. The other problem is that I've had to rearrange the morning routine so Valerie and Tessa can leave at the right time too. Therefore, I'm getting up at 5:00 a.m., a good 45 minutes earlier than normal. Needless to say I've been pretty wiped out lately.

So that's why the blogs haven't been coming. Not that there was ever a steady stream of posts here anyway, but I've been trying to be a little more consistent recently. There's lots of events coming up that I'll want to talk about (Motorheat!) and a few opinion pieces I've been thinking of so hopefully there will be more frequent postings, and hopefully better than whatever that last one was. Seriously, I have no idea what that was. Super sorry.

'Bye for now.