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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2BzqT4S:
got to work at 7 this morning, the other guy in my department is salaried and checks emails from home on the weekend (i have a definite like, uh, no i’m paid hourly so i don’t work off the clock kinda deal going on, which I’ve had to be cranky about in the past) and he texted me last night that we’re up near 200 orders to try to print shipping labels for this morning by the time Amazon’s automatic deposit goes through. so.*
i like being at work when the store’s closed. (I used to refuse to, bc there was some fuckery with an employee who’d come in super early for his shift and then steal shit, but nobody remembers that, so now I’ll come in, because whatever. if I’m clocked in, I’m here. If I’m here, I’m clocked in. If I’m not clocked in, I’m not here. That’s my only sort of self-defense here: I’m never in the store off the record. I can’t prove anything by it– the time clock is super easy to game too, plus it’s not like it automatically records that you’re here– but I can at least establish precedent. If I wasn’t clocked in I wasn’t there. Shrug. I’ve worked here going on a decade now, so.) (It might BE a decade now. Shit.)
ANyway. It’s peaceful, and I can listen to music as loud as I want. First off I listened to Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance, which I super recommend to anyone looking for something to listen to today.
Now I’ve moved on to doom metal– Windhand’s 2013 offering, Soma, which is really heavy and slow and meditative. I really like it; they have a female vocalist but she sings alto and way down in the mix, so she’s there and she wails sometimes but never sharply, and like, the whole thing just melts into this incredibly thick rich sludge of sound that just kind of envelops you.
The downside of being at work super early is that time sort of flies by and before you know it people are here and you’re like what do i have to show for all this time i just spent here but you know. It’s not fair, I could really be fucking around on Tumblr the whole time, and I’m not, and i’m still not getting anything done. Which is, I guess, just excellent cover for those times when I do fuck around on Tumblr…
Anyhow. Hi everyone. I’m stoned out of my gourd on heavy metal and hyperfocus, how are you?
* oh yah we’re a small seller on Amazon and the way the Giant Hellsite works is that they only give you your money once you’ve printed a label to prove you shipped the item… and they deposit your money in batches, every two weeks, on a Monday morning, with a big auto-batch process that goes through. If you sell, for example, $24,102.10 worth of shit over the weekend (just to pick a number totally at random and not at all from the note I just wrote down and that doesn’t include our expedited or multiple-quantity invoices because I have them sorted separately, that’s another $2,462.13), and you manage to print the labels for only a couple of those items before the batch goes through, you’re not gonna see $24,001.15 or whatever of that money until two weeks from today. And they don’t pay interest or anything, so, that’s money you just don’t have, for items you’ve already delivered. Shrug! That’s just how Amazon works.
So I’m trying to ship everything I can get my hands on before that nebulous whenever-deadline. It’s an automated process and it goes through when it goes through. Sometimes it’s 10am. Sometimes it’s 2pm.
We call it Crunch Monday. It’s brutal this time of year. Especially since our warehouse is remote and staffed by an utter moron. But hey.
That’s life in This Dystopian Hellscape!
But, selling on Amazon means our small local family-owned™ business is still open, when most of the other little shops in our industry have closed down, so, we’ll take it!
(It just means that not having that $25k we just earned means we can’t buy more stuff in time for Christmas, because we’re really little and that’s a huge chunk of our operating budget, so that’s awesome. Also did you know sometimes when electronics manufacturers do Instant Rebate type promotions, the dealer paid full price for that thing that they’re now selling to you for below their own cost, and the manufacturer has net 60 days to reimburse them for the difference? This is why we get so fucking cranky when you ask us to cut you a deal. We’re already in the hole on this fucking gadget, and if we screw up the paperwork at all– say, by charging you the wrong price!– the manufacturer just plain won’t give us back the instant savings rebate, so we’ve now sold you that thing for significantly less than it cost us. Oh and, we won’t know that for 60 to 90 days. And Amazon won’t even give us the less-than-cost amount we earned for another two weeks. We have to pay our landlord and electric bill and employees… Again, interest-free, the manufacturer doesn’t give you anything for having held onto your entire profit plus a lot for two months, you’ve basically given them interest-free loans on the whole shebang. It is brutal to be a small electronics retailer and that is why our chain has shrunk to four stores from about 150, and why most of our competitors are gone.)
(Your picture was not posted)
got to work at 7 this morning, the other guy in my department is salaried and checks emails from home on the weekend (i have a definite like, uh, no i’m paid hourly so i don’t work off the clock kinda deal going on, which I’ve had to be cranky about in the past) and he texted me last night that we’re up near 200 orders to try to print shipping labels for this morning by the time Amazon’s automatic deposit goes through. so.*
i like being at work when the store’s closed. (I used to refuse to, bc there was some fuckery with an employee who’d come in super early for his shift and then steal shit, but nobody remembers that, so now I’ll come in, because whatever. if I’m clocked in, I’m here. If I’m here, I’m clocked in. If I’m not clocked in, I’m not here. That’s my only sort of self-defense here: I’m never in the store off the record. I can’t prove anything by it– the time clock is super easy to game too, plus it’s not like it automatically records that you’re here– but I can at least establish precedent. If I wasn’t clocked in I wasn’t there. Shrug. I’ve worked here going on a decade now, so.) (It might BE a decade now. Shit.)
ANyway. It’s peaceful, and I can listen to music as loud as I want. First off I listened to Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance, which I super recommend to anyone looking for something to listen to today.
Now I’ve moved on to doom metal– Windhand’s 2013 offering, Soma, which is really heavy and slow and meditative. I really like it; they have a female vocalist but she sings alto and way down in the mix, so she’s there and she wails sometimes but never sharply, and like, the whole thing just melts into this incredibly thick rich sludge of sound that just kind of envelops you.
The downside of being at work super early is that time sort of flies by and before you know it people are here and you’re like what do i have to show for all this time i just spent here but you know. It’s not fair, I could really be fucking around on Tumblr the whole time, and I’m not, and i’m still not getting anything done. Which is, I guess, just excellent cover for those times when I do fuck around on Tumblr…
Anyhow. Hi everyone. I’m stoned out of my gourd on heavy metal and hyperfocus, how are you?
* oh yah we’re a small seller on Amazon and the way the Giant Hellsite works is that they only give you your money once you’ve printed a label to prove you shipped the item… and they deposit your money in batches, every two weeks, on a Monday morning, with a big auto-batch process that goes through. If you sell, for example, $24,102.10 worth of shit over the weekend (just to pick a number totally at random and not at all from the note I just wrote down and that doesn’t include our expedited or multiple-quantity invoices because I have them sorted separately, that’s another $2,462.13), and you manage to print the labels for only a couple of those items before the batch goes through, you’re not gonna see $24,001.15 or whatever of that money until two weeks from today. And they don’t pay interest or anything, so, that’s money you just don’t have, for items you’ve already delivered. Shrug! That’s just how Amazon works.
So I’m trying to ship everything I can get my hands on before that nebulous whenever-deadline. It’s an automated process and it goes through when it goes through. Sometimes it’s 10am. Sometimes it’s 2pm.
We call it Crunch Monday. It’s brutal this time of year. Especially since our warehouse is remote and staffed by an utter moron. But hey.
That’s life in This Dystopian Hellscape!
But, selling on Amazon means our small local family-owned™ business is still open, when most of the other little shops in our industry have closed down, so, we’ll take it!
(It just means that not having that $25k we just earned means we can’t buy more stuff in time for Christmas, because we’re really little and that’s a huge chunk of our operating budget, so that’s awesome. Also did you know sometimes when electronics manufacturers do Instant Rebate type promotions, the dealer paid full price for that thing that they’re now selling to you for below their own cost, and the manufacturer has net 60 days to reimburse them for the difference? This is why we get so fucking cranky when you ask us to cut you a deal. We’re already in the hole on this fucking gadget, and if we screw up the paperwork at all– say, by charging you the wrong price!– the manufacturer just plain won’t give us back the instant savings rebate, so we’ve now sold you that thing for significantly less than it cost us. Oh and, we won’t know that for 60 to 90 days. And Amazon won’t even give us the less-than-cost amount we earned for another two weeks. We have to pay our landlord and electric bill and employees… Again, interest-free, the manufacturer doesn’t give you anything for having held onto your entire profit plus a lot for two months, you’ve basically given them interest-free loans on the whole shebang. It is brutal to be a small electronics retailer and that is why our chain has shrunk to four stores from about 150, and why most of our competitors are gone.)
(Your picture was not posted)
