Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:16:51 GMT

I'm finding that "craft" shows in my neck of the woods are fairly miserable things--in part, probably, because many let buy&sell retailers in with those of us who make all our own product. It doesn't take much talent to order things from Oriental Trader, y'know.

And the kind of people attracted to shows like that, who happily toss their money at rhinestone-encrusted, mixed-metal, glue-and-plastic low-quality wares . . .

Three customers stand out from this weekend, amongst the people who wanted to try all my earrings on (Eew eew eew no!), and the idiots who tried to tell me my belts are really necklaces (yeah, for those of you with 40" necks), and the bastard children picking things up and literally throwing them on the floor, and the worthless parents who stood by and watched their child grab & twist handfuls of my hair sticks' dangles.

The first really memorable one was a woman who came up, put a finger on my sign for maille bracelets, and said, "Malley?"

"No," I said. "Maille." Sounds like "male." Anyone who's ever seen the stuff, or gone to a ren faire, or even just paid attention in history class knows this.

"Are you Malley?"

. . .

"Maille," I said, in case she'd missed it.

"Malley," she said, and poked the sign again.

"No. Maille. Like chainmaille." I poked a different sign, since that seemed to be the language she was speaking.

"Is your name Malley?"

Apparently not.

"It's not malley. It's maille. Chainmaille."

Blank stare.

"Like knights wore. You know--middle ages?"

Blank stare.

I tried again. "Ren faires?"

Even more blank stare.

"You saw Lord of the Rings?"

She brightened. "Oh! Okay, I get it now."

"Okay," I said, and went to roll into the sales pitch--idiot or not, her money'd still feed me--but before I could get going, she started talking again.

"So you're not Malley?"

I miss convention crowd kids. They understand what you're doing if/when you feel the need to headdesk yourself into a coma.

Then, the next day, Maille turned up. With her mom. I looked up from the anklet I was making to find a tween girl & her mother in front of the table, poking my sign again. Thinking nothing of it, I started talking to them--and got a bit of deja vu when the woman asked, "Are you Malley?"

Actually, it wasn't like deja vu. It was more like waking up from a nightmare, only to realize you're still in the nightmare when the creepy-crawly launches itself out from under your bed.

I'd learned, though. "Nope. That's the bracelet, and it's maille."

The daughter's face at this point went from a bland smile to completely blank. The mother kept grinning and talking.

"She's Maille. We've never seen anyone spell their name like this before."

I did not shriek or headdesk or throttle her. "Well, that's maille. Like chainmaille. Like knights in armor. Or ren faires, or Legolas."

The daughter's face started falling. The mother started to look confused. "So that's . . . maille?"

"Yup." I held up my anklet, which at this point was just a shiny silver & purple chain. "This, too."

"That's . . . Her name is spelled the same way, and we say it Malley. No one else spells it like that. I . . . I've never seen it like this before."

"That's okay," I said. "That's what I guessed," is what I almost said. But I figured the kid was probably already scarred for life, so I held back. It's not every day you find out your parent is an illiterate uncultured moron--and thankfully, it's not every day that their being an illiterate uncultured moron saddles you with an unfortunate name.

At least her name wasn't Chlamydia, I guess.

The third . . .

So it was the last day, it'd been raining, I was burnt out and cranky and somewhat miserable, and this woman walked up to my booth, looked at me, and said, "Belly button."

It was my turn for a blank stare.

The woman stared back. After a few seconds, she tried again. "Belly button."

Staring wasn't working; so I blinked a few times, shook off the urge to run screaming, and finally said, "What?"

"Belly button!"

. . .

Maybe, I thought, she was asking to see my belly button. Or maybe she'd slipped her handler.

I took a deep breath, looked around for anyone who might've been looking for her--didn't see anyone, of course--and tried once more. "I'm sorry--what?"

"Do you have . . . belly button?"

I gave up at this point and poked myself in the stomach. "Yes I do! Right there."

The woman started gesturing at this point, and as she started speaking in something more closely resembling a sentence I realized that she wasn't handicapped--she was just phenomenally stupid. "No, like . . . do you have . . . like . . . belly button!"

At this point I realized she was trying to ask for body jewelry.

At this point I also decided that I'm not a fucking mind reader, I'm not being paid enough to translate someone's halfassed attempts at sentences, and it's not my fucking responsibility to ask myself the question about my own stock for them. So I played dumb. "I'm sorry, what are you asking?"

With what looked like a monumental mental effort, she finally coughed out a full question. "Do you have, like, the things for belly buttons?"

"Body jewelry? No m'am--I only carry jewelry that I make myself."

"But do you make jewelry for belly buttons?"

. . .

It really is amazing that I did not kill her.

This coming weekend theoretically puts me at a long-running show where the populace is more artistically minded and the crafters all definitely make their stuff by hand. I've already upped my game with a spiffy new tablecloth and some new displays--hopefully I'll do better there. And not kill anyone. At least not while there's witnesses around.

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:47:22 GMT

If I do this, I'll have the time to get to everything that needs done. But that silly guaranteed-paycheck day job is in the way . . .

That being said, I've got $7 on Borders going out of business in or by August. (Last week it was $5--then I learned how close we came to going under at the end of last quarter.) We're not getting in a lot of titles again, just like we were when we didn't have credit or funds to buy books from the publishers . . . We've got bargain everywhere, trying to lure in the cheap people with non-returnables and remainders no one wanted to begin with . . . We've got empty shelves left and right, and stores that've been hit by Project Phoenix don't even have the hours to get new releases out of pallets and onto the floor . . . And then the head of Pershing, the company that owns 40% of our stocks and is in charge of our one $42.5 million loan, seems to think that we're really, really aiming towards something we're not.

The business model of book superstores, however, is likely to change over time from primarily bookstores to merchants of a wider variety of products and services which are designed to appeal to the higher-income educated consumer that, on average, spends an hour or more in a book superstore.

Hope Otakon goes well enough to cover the expected forthcoming holes in my finances. Stock-wise, I'm almost back up to where I was for ANext. Two more weeks' hard crunchwork should get me up to a decent level. I hope.

I think I shall stab the next person who asks me if this is made of "pop tabs." (Though the last person to ask me seemed borderline-illiterate--I stood an aisle away from her today at work and listened to her painful attempts at pronouncing titles, and I felt sad for her.)

Reading China Mieville's The City & The City, and remembering how much I missed the thinking person's fantasy as opposed to the straightforward popcorn reads. While it's a little dry and the characterization doesn't really stand out in any way, it's very intelligently written and the worldbuilding's fascinating enough to help drive the narrative forward & keep my attention. I'm about a third of the way through and thus far I like it. :)

I have an ARC and might be persuaded to let it go once I'm finished. :)

Borders snark hits youtube

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:40:45 GMT

This is terrible yet oh-so-true.

Everything I learned about what not to do in a business . . .

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:03:12 GMT

Okay, so I'm starting to really hate Borders Group.

Lately they've been forcing the sellers to push these two books, The Middle Place and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. We absolutely have to sell these books, or we all get bitched at, written up, or possibly terminated. Grouchy anonymice at Lj's iworkatborders aren't having success either--and yet Borders Group doesn't care. We've still gotta sell it.

Because nothing sells books like a frantic salesperson fearing for their job, right? Other than a used car salesman, of course.

The fact that this particular book push runs until the middle of June doesn't help things in the least bit. We get regulars in our store. Think we can push the the same book to the same people for a few months? Without driving them away? Think again.

But who really wants these books, anyway? The Middle Place is about a woman who finds out she has cancer, then finds out her dad has cancer. It's like The Last Lecture, only with a bratty narrator that I have all kinds of problems relating to. She's at the doctor's, talking about cancer treatments. The doctor tells her she has to use this hormone therapy, and one of the side effects is that she won't be able to have kids for five years. The woman starts freaking out--she wants kids, she'll be 40-something by the time she's done with it, she can't wait that long.

The doctor points out that she already has two kids.

She doesn't care. She wants more. Now.

And at this point I'm waving the book around and going, "What the fuck, woman! You've got cancer! You could die! Get some fucking priorities! Fucking adopt!"

But yeah, I'm supposed to be able to sell this to people with some modicum of effectiveness. We've tried, of course. Two coworkers have had two separate customers start crying because someone in their families has or has died of cancer. Most customers pretty much put their hands up and rapidly back off. "Cancer, huh? Thanks but no thanks." I understand--I just wish the company's higher-ups did as well.

And for the Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet--It's like if Mitch Albom wrote Snow Falling on Cedars. I liked Snow Falling on Cedars. But when you rework that with a stagnant and contradictory narrative composed of pedestrian 4th grade reading level prose--you get a decent if stereotypical feel for the one character, but there is no joy to the writing at all--then slap a cheap bendy cardboard-feeling cover on it and try to charge more than $20 a pop? Especially in this economy, and in a market where genre fiction sales are showing an increase? Let's think about how well this works.

And yet the company continues to flood their shelves with things that don't go anywhere. Dozens of large paperback horror novels from small presses with drunken editors. Dozens more Anne Brasheres, which take up a whole shelf and don't go anywhere. Stacks of manga versions of novels. Boodith. Cassie Clare does not move in our store. Her second book only sells in conjunction with the first; people who buy the first book by itself don't come back for the second. The copies of her second book that we have? They're ones we got when it came out, a year ago. I have absolutely no idea why we haven't sent them back yet.

And yet Borders' buyers, who won't give us Joe Hill, who won't keep us stocked with steady sellers like Kelley Armstrong or Jim Butcher, who won't send us any manga series but Naruto and won't fill in starter volumes and gaps in the series we already have (The fuck you mean, we can't get the first volume of Bleach?), who think it's fine to only stock unrelated segments of any number of Nora Roberts's series and no mass markets of anything Gregory Maguire, who only sent us three of Ariana Franklin's new work though we've sold ten of her first in the past two weeks, and who somehow feel no need to send us Rothfuss's Name of the Wind--even though we sell out of that faster than anything in SF/F besides Charlaine Harris--are sending us two dozen of CC's fucking third book.

You know how many of her books we've sold since December? One.

Either someone's a fucking moron or someone's trying to force this one into bestseller status. Or both.

The one similarly snarky coworker postulates that the buyers are grabbing up whatever they can get for cheap and trying to create a market rather than deal with things from the bigger publishers--whom we as a company may or may not have book credit problems with. Guiding a market is possible. Creating your own niche product/service in a market is a feasible aim. But even I know that if you nuke your employees' morale as you sink a shitton of money and hours into trying to forcibly make a market without properly thinking things through or researching your demographic first, then you've just fucked yourself.

The first step to making money? Having a product people want to buy. What we're seeing here is the equivalent of trying to force-feed plain oatmeal to a crowd in search of fruit-stuffed and whipped-cream-topped Belgian waffles. You can hope to hell they're hungry enough to eat the oatmeal, but don't expect them to not head straight out your door and to the IHOP down the street.

Business issues aside, I'm still stuck in the morass of this disaster. I can't suggest the books I know are good fun reads (since we don't have them) and can't effectively suggest the things the company is demanding I sell (because they annoy the piss out of me or because I find the original version superior). Add in the lack of raises for everyone this year, the slashed hours, and the perpetual browbeating about everything we absolutely have to be selling (beans, bunnies, these particular books) and doing (Pull stuff to send back! Tag all these things with red stickers! Tag all these other things this way! Move this! Move that! Clean this! Rearrange that!) with the constant nasty emails from Corporate (YOU'RE JUST NOT TRYING TO SELL THIS ITEM HARD ENOUGH!) and the overhanging threat to our jobs, and . . .

Yeah. It's like watching something drown, and it's towards the end, and the flailing is going into its final panicked stages and you know that if you reach in to attempt salvation, the thing's just gonna sink its teeth into your arm and drag you down with it.

Only a few months left before we find out if the company'll go on for another year. I'm not optimistic.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:39:26 GMT

Lookie! I found my birthday present to myself. :D

Also: Once again, Neil Gaiman has proven himself deserving of freshly-baked cookies. I read this and guffawed so much the better half put down his video game to find out what I was up to. From his blog this morning:

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and

Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo.

I wonder if I'll find the time to sit down and finish The Graveyard Book--it seemed like much fun, so I hope so. I also wonder if this means we'll get more than a couple copies of The Graveyard Book into our store. But Borders Group is still flailing in altogether disturbing ways, so I doubt it. Instead I still have the awful feeling that we're gonna see the axe falling on a few local places before this mess is all over.

Cnn.com tells me the economic turnaround is predicted at around the end of the second quarter, though. So what's that--six months to limp along? And if we make it that far, we'll be good? We'll see.

But I won't stop applying around. A full forty hours at minimum wage would net me more than "full time" at Borders. And with BGInc nixing any bonuses or raises this year (but giving ex-CEO George Jones $2.1 million to go away), I'd be stupid to not just take a rinky-dink job that's closer to home and make do with it.

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:36:17 GMT

Hatred of job reaching critical mass. Critical mass shall be achieved once it becomes more mentally calming to go to the original hell-on-earth job.

Stupidity of second job's customer base, though, may insure the impossibility of said critical mass.

I should be nano-ing or finishing the last 5% of my chapter. Instead I'm plotting retail guerilla warfare. So far I've got calling for schedule checks at inopportune times, working the general dissent from behind the scenes, making sure I get scheduled hours for the specialty tasks I'm not actually being paid for, and . . . not blowing up at someone. I feel like I'm missing any number of other ideas.

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:42:44 GMT

Plz be telling me why work sees fit to change the schedule without telling anyone the day before the week turns, then has managers get pissy with people who have other, already cemented schedules to work around.

Day is hell. I wanna go home. Thankfully, the scheduling BS means I go home an hour early. Right now I don't care that I've lost time on the clock. I need a mental health day.

workin' with the drama llama

Sat, 10 May 2008 18:12:19 GMT

Way back when, I mentioned the manager who'd gone insane. She's back, is still insane, and is feeling juuuust a little vindictive. (I can tell this because she's taken my hours from fifteen and twenty a week to four, then tried to tell me that my hours had to go instead of any other part-time person's because I was management.) She's currently trying to tell all of us that the dummy cameras the company tacked to our ceiling are really live-feeding to the home office.

We're gonna ignore how I know they're dummy cameras . . . Okay, we're not. They're dome cameras with a red blinking light. Google that and you'll find fakies. They're also a different size and shade than the single real camera (which live-feeds, with no recording, pausing, or replay capabilities, to a highly visible tv). Also, in relation to how it would cost thousands of dollars for one store alone to hook up a transmitting network (a wireless one wouldn't work with our terrain) to an office with limited hours (so we'd have no chance of catching any shoplifters that came in after office hours) when our company is so damned cheap to begin with that it won't even get us a new scanner for our register, attach the credit card machines to the registers to cut down on human errors, or hook up any kind of internet access for real-time, non-faxed intercompany communications--and especially in relation to how a handful of $20 battery-operated plug&play fake cameras costs a hell of a lot less than a handful of installation-required $80-$300 cameras--and my suspension of disbelief has given up completely.

She tried to tell me the live feed story, I asked who told her that one, and she refused to answer.

I started to wonder if she really thinks we're that stupid.

I bounced her stats off a psychologist/social worker colleague and got BPD back: Lying, paranoia & attempted fostering of paranoia, addictions, more lying, (attempted) setting people against each other, starting rumors, smiling while backstabbing, believing a person to be all good or all bad (and idealizing/demonizing them accordingly), so forth. BPD is rough to work with. You can't rationalize with the person (as they tend to believe the lies they're telling) and there's no real slowing them down (note: not "fixing them") without liberal application of psychologists and drugs. The only thing we can really do is much documentation and damage control.

I do not like this.