Daily Bread

Well, it has been a while since I (b)logged on...  :) Happy New Year!

Since my primary business is an internet based shop, you would think I would have all the time in the world  to blog. NOT! I have no idea where people find the time to maintain their sites, field emails and phone calls, let alone BLOG! This is how my day usually goes:

Get up (that is, if I have been sleeping- today I am up because I have been coughing and can't sleep) at around 6AM.

Make coffee and get my daily bran muffin (oh how this keeps me healthy!)

Straighten whatever mess is in the kitchen and surrounding areas (on a good day).

Mosey into my office and check/respond to emails from four active email accounts.

Check listings on ebay, if I have any (lately I have not because it has been dead on ebay).

Check to see what sales I had overnight on http://www.mamashecrazy.etsy.com.

Check convos on etsy account and answer them.

Enter any sales into my sales journal/pick sheets for filling orders later.

Make sure no listings have become inactive because they have expired.

Check the search pages for keywords and see where my listings come up (if mine are in the back, I list something right away).

Check the competition for price adjustments, etc.

If I have responded to all my correspondence and nothing more is pressing, I leave my office and go attend to shipping. This is where I lose the most time, my friends.

I pride myself in sending out only 1st quality goods to my patrons. I am also not cheap with the yardage. If you order a yard, you do not get 36 inches; you'll get more like 40"-42". Your merchandise will not be packed cheaply either. The last thing I want is for one of my customers to tell me that they received their key fob clamps all bent up. Therefore, If you order hardware, it will be sent in a bubble-wrapped envelope, at the very least.

When I am running a sale, like I am right now, shipping gets to be a real drag sometimes. Like right now I and selling 1.25" solid colored heavyweight cotton webbing for $1.00/yd. My regular customers will order 10 yards of a color, which is labor intensive. But then I will have a new customer want one yard of 24 different colors. This is not only labor intensive, it's just a downright pain in the neck. Every yard is cut by me and packed by me. I should actually be charging more, not less for this. 

My favorite orders to pack are bulk rolls. A 50 yard roll of cotton webbing normally fits into a flat rate priority box. Although I have to unroll half the roll and re-roll it so that 25 yards are on top of each other, it still only takes me a few minutes. I stick it into the flat rate box, add some bogus paper and seal the box. Voila! That', my friends, is why "bulk" is cheaper. Done with that order.

After a box or envelope has been packed, the "pick"ticket is marked with the weight and size of what is being shipped and set aside. The package is marked with the last name of the customer and their zip code. Then it's time to print out the postage.

I use pay pal for my etsy customers to pay me with. Their program allows me to bulk ship a bunch of packages at a time. Even though the program could be improved, it's pretty fast. Basically, I go to the mulit-ship program and all my customers who are waiting for their merchandise are listed there. All I have to do is match the customer on the screen with the "pick" ticket in front of me and enter the weight and size of the package being sent. Sounds easy. At this point I always get aggravated. I am looking at a ticket that says, "Mary Jones, zip code, 91743." All I see on pay pal is "Creative Crafts." The only clue that I may have that this company name and Mary Jones are one in the same, is that when I originally entered the information onto the pick ticket, I noted the person's etsy name (which may or may not be "Creative Crafts"). Why do people make my life miserable? How come their etsy name and their pay pal name can't match? In my quickly advancing age, I find it hard on my eyes to track linear information. So, looking for a name that does not exist is infuriating. I guess things could be worse...

After all the postage is printed, it's back to the shipping room to apply the labels to the boxes. This is pretty fast since the boxes/packages have been marked already. It's just a matter of taping the labels on. And then all I need to do is get to the post office.

Now, people have told me that I can leave my packages with my postman- this would make my life easier. My eighty year old postman... The one and only time that I handed my packages over to dear Willy, five of them came back with insufficient postage. I then had to go to the post office, only to find out that the postage was fine. So now, I just go to the post office to drop my packages. There's a 24 hour a day accessible drop, so I can drop them at the end of the day when the post office is officially closed. This is great because although I may be done with my shipping by 3PM, you haven't really seen in this blog when I take my shower...?

In between everything I have described, the phone may ring from either my manufacturing parent company, or a friend who figures since I'm home I can chat a while, or a customer. Any of these three choices could eat away at my day. And who does the accounts receivable and accounts payable? The filing? Moi!

And so my dear friends, although my day doesn't sound especially horrid since I don't have a boss hovering over me, it is sometimes hectic. And I ask again, who has time to blog?

In Sickness and In Health

Well, if there is one thing you can say about working for someone, it's that you usually get paid sick days, or at least the opportunity to take the time off and get well. When you work for yourself  and have a home office, the work never ends. There is always someone to email or something to do. I think I am going to start posting hours on my office door and sticking to them.

I will get one of those clocks that people stick on their window saying when they'll be back. The only problem with that is that I can change the time...

Another Halloween Comes And Goes

As a child, some of my fondest memories were dressing up for Halloween and going trick-or-treating. I trick or treated when guys were hanging around on the side of the drugstore with their diddy-bop waves. Even though those same guys may have just scored some airplane glue from the local toy store and proceeded to use it in a way that didn't involve a  plastic model, it was still a more innocent time.

 I remember my mother giving me thirty-one cents to walk to the bakery (I was 10 years old) to get a seeded rye, sliced. All by myself, without even a thought that anything remotely bad would happen to me, I would walk the three blocks, past the bowling alley and into the shopping center where the bakery was. Back then in my town of Plainview, NY everyone pretty much knew each other. Even if you didn't know them personally, the town was small enough that you saw the same people over and over. Such was the case when I would walk into the bakery, not tall enough to see past the second shelf. On tip-toes, I would tell the woman behind the counter that I wanted a seeded rye, sliced. She would take the thirty-one cents from me by practically falling over the counter just to get low enough to reach my hand. She would then reach into the shelves of freshly baked cookies and point to one with the chocolate chips and ask if I would like to have one. I don't think I ever turned her down. Having said thank you, I would leave and start for home. I would eat my cookie and when I was through with it, I would then open the waxed bakery bag and take the most delicious part of the seeded rye, the heel, and devour that. I would get home, safe and sound without a care.

 My immediate neighborhood encompassed my street, which ran in the shape of an oval. Off the oval was a court or cul-de-sac, and around the other side of the oval was a long street with three other small streets attached. All the streets had names of western places like "Vegas Ct.",  "Fresno Drive" and "Wilshire Lane". And so when Halloween came around, there were probably some sixty houses where you could trick-or-treat. 

We would go in groups or with a friend or two, all dressed up in our finest Halloween attire to trick-or treat through the neighborhood. Now, living in the northeast, most times October 31st was biting cold. So if you had let's say, a princess outfit, you would layer shirts beneath the cheap satin costume and for good measure put on your fall jacket over the garish ensemble. Then of course, you would plop on your plastic mask, and voile! You were a princess. A badly dressed, warm princess. Very scary.

There was one older woman on Wilshire Lane who used to make fresh, hot donuts every Halloween. Now, she really didn't know me well, but she knew my best friend's parents. So, she knew who I was and she knew Anne, my BFF. We would hit this woman's house like three times in a night looking for those donuts. We would take another mask or two with us, plop it on over our faces and go back to her house, thinking that she didn't have a clue who we were. We would run up to the door, same princess outfits, same bad fall jackets with different masks and magically we were new kids. The woman would never be the wiser. I remember going up to the house for the third time and the woman said that she was waiting for a batch to get done cooking, that we should come in and wait. Panic set in. Would she know our identities? Beneath our now humidity laden plastic masks, we both stood there waiting, silent, wanting those donuts so bad, but not wanting the humiliation of being found to be deceptive little princess piggies. At last, the woman came out of the kitchen and said, "Here you go- nice warm donuts. Oh, and Anne and Susie, you don't have to change masks the next time. I know all you children come back over and over." Oh the humiliation. I could feel my cheeks redden beneath the mask. Found out! But how could she know?? Anne and I scurried out of there like the little rats we were. But it didn't stop us from doing the very same thing the next year.

As you can see by the picture above, my immaturity forces me to plop on a wax nose, complete with a wart, and paint myself green, in order to get over the fact that I can no longer trick-or- treat on Halloween.  This is what I looked like this year. A couple of kids came to the door, took a look at me and said, "Nice costume." I didn't miss a beat and said, "What costume?" They retreated with their goody bags pretty fast.

 I can't get those donuts anymore, and I'm too old to be trick-or-treating,  but I can still create some memories for the kids who venture out on October 31st.

Workies

How would you like to get out of bed, make yourself a cup of coffee, and go to work in your jammies? That is my day, everyday, and I am as happy as a clam. Fact is that my office is in my home, and although it's very convenient that I can sit here in my jammies and not have to answer to anyone, the reality is sobering. If I don't get it done it doesn't get done. If I screw up there is no one to blame it on except me. If I don't earn the money, the electric gets turned off and there is no food to eat. 

There is a lot to be said about getting up and getting out. When I worked for someone else, it forced me to get up and BE SOMEWHERE at the same time everyday. It forced me to be civil very early in the morning, too. It forced me to be social with people I wouldn't ordinarily socialize with. It forced me to bank at certain hours and to organize my life around an activity that I wasn't loving. Last but not least, it forced me to buy gift wrap, candy, and cookware I didn't need, but was pressured into buying because my co-workers would bring their kids' fundraisers into work, not to mention giving money towards parties for co-workers I barely knew- to send them off into motherhood, retirement, or in some cases, their graves. There might be something to be said about working outside of the house, but really, not a whole lot to recommend it.