Month: October 2016

On today’s activities

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work6 Comments

Unknown.jpegSo here is the thing about the clearance section at my job: it is never finished and is never actually correct.  Furniture in clearance comes in one of two flavors: discontinued furniture, which is usually stuff that used to be a floor model and is therefore in pretty good condition (and, accordingly, generally a damn good deal) and stuff that has been returned, exchanged, or damaged, which can be anything.  We have a chair on the floor that originally retailed for $599 that we were originally trying to get $50 for until I touched it and ran across the store to get to the hand sanitizer.  I insisted the manager touch it.  He did.  It’s now priced at $10, and I may buy it myself just so I can insist it be taken out back, thrown into the dumpster, and possibly shot for good measure.

I may take a picture of it tomorrow, actually.

Anyway.  To be in clearance “correctly,” a piece of furniture needs three things:

  1. To have a price tag on it.  Clearance starts around 15% off, is usually 30% off, and can be much more steeply discounted depending on the condition of the piece.
  2. To have what’s called a “zebra tag” on the back of the price tag.  Zebra tags are scannable, which makes inventory easier, and also have the code we need to actually sell the thing on them.  Now, note, to create one of these, we need to know what a piece actually is.  If there’s a piece that we haven’t sold in a couple of years, which happens more often than you’d think, identification can take a while.
  3. To be located in Clearance in the computer inventory system.  So, for example, if something is on the floor in Area 12 and goes discontinued and gets physically moved into clearance, someone has to tell the computer that it’s been moved and where it should be.  If something gets moved from the warehouse into clearance, its location needs to be moved in the computer as well.

This last part is especially important when we sell stuff, and especially important when we sell a clearanced return item that is actually on the floor in new condition somewhere.  Sell the wrong one and the delivery guys might pick up the floor model to deliver to someone’s house, which will get you in deep shit if you’ve just sold a $1200 sectional for $300.

I spent the entire day in the clearance section today, manually going through a print-out of what was supposed to be in there, then finding each item and verifying that 1) and 2) above were true of the item.  If something wasn’t there that was supposed to be I needed to find out what happened to it, and if something was there that wasn’t on my list I needed to figure out how that got screwed up.  Luckily for everyone, I have the type of brain and/or personality that is actually well-suited to this obnoxious-ass task and honestly kind of enjoyed it.

I also built a sectional and hung a couple of rugs.  I don’t ever want to hang rugs ever again; it’s murder and those things are heavy as hell.

At about 6:30 I had to deal with four straight issues from my customers.  At about 7:00 I declared that, having made no sales at all for the day (total store income: $169; for comparison’s sake, we delivered out well over $100,000 in furniture last week) I was leaving early and going to pick up my New Hotness from the UPS depot where it was waiting for me.  I was originally going to wait for my half day on Wednesday, but screw that.

I’ve been fiddling with the phone for an hour or so.  The new camera on the 7+ is niiice, guys.  The low-light especially is ridiculous.  I mean, granted, I can turn lights on, but holy hell.  We’ll see how long it takes for the lack of an audio jack to get on my nerves.

Tomorrow, going to Potbelly’s for lunch is likely to be the highlight of my day– which, holy hell, is the place just called Potbelly?  Have I been calling them by the wrong name for, like, no shit, the last twenty years?  Anyway, one just opened not too far from work, and they are one of the two chain places that I could get in Chicago that I can’t get in South Bend (come on, Pockets!  Come to Butt-head!) and I am unreasonably excited about it.

How was your day?

Some old-fashioned blogwanking

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

Screen Shot 2016-10-16 at 8.08.47 PM.png

That number, 9928.  It bothers me.  It is close to 10,000, and yet it is not 10,000.  In fact, a fair observer might rightly claim that it is less than 10,000.

I assume that you know what to do.

In which pods are cast

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews2 Comments

1424727845212.pngGot home from an 11-hour shift at work and my five-year-old promptly punched me in the balls, if you’re wondering how my day went.

Based on the recommendations of a couple of you in the last thread where I talked about audiobooks, I’ve listened to the first six episodes of the first season of Welcome to Night Vale.  I’ve also downloaded several other things and haven’t gotten around to them yet, so there will be more on this later.

This will be one of those reviews that is entirely negative and then ends with “…but I’m still listening,” by the way, so brace yourself.

So.  Yeah.  Welcome to Night Vale is a roughly 25-minute, twice-monthly podcast that just released their 96th episode today, so they’ve been around a while.  I’ve listened to their first six, so it’s entirely possible that in the intervening nearly four years they’ve gotten better at the things I’m complaining about.  The premise is actually pretty cool: the idea is that it’s a news broadcast on community radio in a town that is constantly beset with weird, supernatural/alien/Lovecraftian happenings.  There’s a musical interlude each episode (introduced, oddly, with “and now, the weather”) by what seems to be entirely indie artists that I’ve never heard of and is generally pretty uniformly satisfying.  Look up “Jerusalem” by Dan Bern on the iTunes store if you’re curious.

Here’s the problem: at least early on, Welcome to Night Vale feels like it was written by a talented high school student.  It is– and I hope this makes sense to some of you, and I’m going to try and write it as clearly as I can– not good, but it is close to good in a very specific way that means that it might actually be more tolerable if it were simply bad.  In other words, there’s potential all over this thing, only right now it’s too damn clever for its own good.  The authors think that long sentences and repetition of long phrases are really really funny, for example, only they’re not– in fact, they’re really predictable.  I was able to anticipate a whole lot of lines in the first few episodes word-for-word despite never having heard them before, for example.  Overwrought descriptions are also a common, massively overused trope.

Sounds bad, right?  But I listened to the first five episodes over the last couple of days, and then on the way home instead of listening to something else I downloaded number six.  I may jump ahead a couple of years tomorrow– there’s not an overarching narrative that I’ve noticed yet, so I doubt I’m missing anything really– and see if they’ve learned from experience at all.  After that, we’ll move on to something else.  We’ll see how it goes.

Whoa

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I almost forgot to blog today– I’ve been cleaning all day because I made dinner for some old friends tonight, and we were sitting around the table and chatting and it hit me that I didn’t have a post up yet.

Doesn’t mean the post is gonna be a good one, mind you.

Have a cute Winona Ryder .gif:

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In which something’s gotta change

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work4 Comments

This is, I dunno, the third Thursday in a row that I’ve completely wasted.  For several weeks now my Thursdays have gone like this: wake up, take the boy to school, come back home, deliberately go to bed, wake up sometime in the mid-afternoon, and laze about for the rest of the day.

I work three eleven-hour days a week.  Those days I get home, hug my wife and my son, and go to bed.  Maybe I read a bit.  I can’t afford to waste a fourth day doing absolutely nothing when I only have one other day to get shit done during the week.  We’re, like, a foot deep in dog hair around here.  This nonsense has gotta stop.

Obviously, the solution is more caffeine.  Way, way, way more caffeine.

More on audiobooks

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek9 Comments

bogart-bacall-on-the-radio-otrcat.com.jpgA few days ago I wrote a post about listening to an audiobook for the first time.  I’ve since completed the two-hour recording, using a combination of listening in the car and listening over headphones before bed.  Of the two, I much prefer the car; listening to headphones with someone next to me is weird and I found that I wanted to be doing something with the rest of me while I was listening.  I just have trouble concentrating on what’s coming through headphones for whatever reason; I want that to be the background while I do something else.

I ended up liking the story more by the end of it; the book started with a rather silly premise but at least investigated the implications of it in a really interesting way.  The book has some interesting theology going on, surprisingly enough, which appealed to the part of me that was working toward a Ph.D in biblical studies eons ago.

What I don’t like, it seems, is audiobooks.  I may have to listen to one more to see if the things I don’t like are specific in some way to Zachary Quinto’s reading or are a thing audiobook narrators always do.  Quinto tries to read each character in a different voice, for example, which is fine in concept but in execution we get “Zachary Quinto doing an old woman” or “Zachary Quinto doing a black woman,” and oftentimes it ends up coming off as at best a little stereotypical and at worst occasionally a bit racist.  I also never really got past the “Zachary Quinto is reading a book at me” part of audiobookery, which, okay, that’s what is supposed to be happening– it’s literally what audiobooks are— but it never stopped weirding me out.

Here’s what I realized: I think I might be interested in listening to old-school radio dramas.  I don’t want Zachary Quinto reading a book at me and doing a black woman voice.  I might be interested in Zachary Quinto acting as the narrator with an actual black woman doing her character’s dialogue, though.  I may need to start investigating podcasts a bit; there’s probably something like what I want out there somewhere, and podcasts are a thing that I know nothing about.  Feel free, if you’re interested, to recommend some good podcasts in the comments, and if you know of any audio dramas out there let me know about them.

Untitled

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

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Anecdotes are not data

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I’ve been living in this town a while, and like most of you I know by now which houses are going to have lawns full of signs every November and what party they’ll be for.

Every Trump sign I drive past on my way to work has disappeared.  Every. Single. One.  One guy, whose back yard buts up against a major road, puts his signs behind his house, and had actually surrounded his Trump sign with concrete blocks.  Not only is that sign gone, but so are the blocks and the other four signs for more local candidates.  I didn’t notice any others that had disappeared for anyone other than Trump.

Possible, I suppose, that someone went on a sign-stealing rampage last night. But given the location of that last house, at least, such an action would be at best hugely inconvenient and more likely insanely reckless and dangerous.

I draw no conclusions. Just pointing out what I’ve noticed.