The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
My books will stay free until a couple of hours after midnight, if Amazon holds true to its usual pattern, so if you haven’t gotten around to downloading anything, what’s keeping you?
Other than that, well… I just watched the first episode of Season 2 of Fear the Walking Dead, and the show’s still kinda bad. And my wife’s leaving town tomorrow for almost a week, so the descent into anarchy around here will likely be both swift and thorough.
How’s your weekend going?
I’ve not written anything in the last few days, mostly because my options were “paralyzing anger” and “more paralyzing anger.” Today upgraded everything to “so angry I can’t breathe,” and rather than indulge myself in that at the moment I’m just going to put a bunch of my books up for free. I’ve done a Star Wars Day promotion pretty much every year since my first book came out; I completely flaked on it this time. Let’s fix that.
Tomorrow and Saturday only, all four of my books will be free on Amazon. I don’t think I’ve done all four at the same time before. Check them out:
The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1
The Sanctum of the Sphere: Vol. 2 of the Benevolence Archives
Skylights
Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible, and Why we Do It Anyway
It’s been a really long day and I’m tired and my sales have been utter shit this week and Iron Fist is still a really impressively bad show and oh man do I have some complaints for once I’ve finished watching the damn thing because God forbid I just stop.
Go buy a book and cheer me up. Or, hell, download one for free. I don’t even care which. Don’t make me beg. Because I totally will.
Please.
Sitting very near to me is a pile of paper, about an inch high, that I will need to absorb to some as-yet unclear degree in order to pass an examination on Friday. The test is going to take two fucking hours, and right now I have not the slightest idea what they think is going to take that long. I am and always have been a fast test-taker, so I expect this to take no more than twenty minutes. In theory, I ought to be studying at the moment.
I’m going to save it for tomorrow. I haven’t had a good old-fashioned cramming session in a few years. We’ll see if I’m still any good at it.
A shocking admission: despite my exhaustion, this has been a worthwhile trip, and there is nothing happening tomorrow that makes me think it’s likely that I’ll change my mind. As a lifelong educator the notion that professional development and/or training might not be personally insulting, much less actually useful, is almost unprecedented. Meeting with vendors is great. Granted, they’re all salesmen too and thus hucksters to some degree or another, but I’m actually learning shit.
Oh, and there’s HGTV on the hotel room TV, so you know how I’m really spending my evenings, right?
Also, people who live nearby are posting on Facebook that the local weather services are muttering about a foot of snow on Friday. If the world suddenly ends you know why. Good luck, thanks for all the fish, and all that.
So I caved and got an Apple Watch. It was an accident, I swear; I went into the store intending to just go on a fact-finding mission, secure in the knowledge that even if I were able to pick out one I liked there was no chance of there being any Series 2 watches in stock, and I wanted to physically put my hands on the watches to see how they felt and how they wore and pick one out based on that.
Well. Uh. Oops. Turns out they had exactly two of the exact one I was thinking I wanted– I’ve ordered a knockoff Milanese loop band (don’t tell anyone) that is literally like a seventh of the price that Apple wants, but the fluoroelastomer will do in a pinch, especially since I like to say “fluoroelastomer.”
Right now I’m a trifle underwhelmed, but the UI is largely responsible for that and it’s gonna take me a bit to learn. We’ll see how the battery life works out. I’ll report back in a few days.
I’d heard from my co-workers that the last week of December was going to be insane, but the same people who said that had been telling me that December in general was better than November. I have sold more furniture in the last two and a half days (I left at 2:30 today, as I usually do on Wednesdays) than I did in the entire rest of the month, and this week is already my second highest week of sales ever, with the weekend left to go, which is utter fucking madness. And that’s without any really big sales; I’ve just had a bunch in the 2-3000 range. Yesterday and Monday I was so busy that I could barely keep up with the customers; it was bloody insane.
I can put up with a little bit more of this, though, if the universe would like to keep sending it my way. It’s a problem I’m willing to put up with.
Fielded a call from a customer this evening who was annoyed because she had taken delivery of a recliner this afternoon and, for the second time, said recliner had come in wrong. I apologized and, after getting her last name and looking up her invoice, asked her what had gone wrong.
“We ordered a power recliner. This one’s not power,” she said.
Hm.
The following problems were immediately apparent:
Upon further investigation, it became clear that the customer’s sole problem with her new recliner was that it wasn’t a power recliner. Upon gently pushing back on this contention, she stuck to her guns: she’d ordered a power recliner, and she’d gotten a power recliner, and she’d sent it back because one of the feet were broken.
Note also that no power recliner on the floor has feet. So there’s no way that she got a power recliner that had broken feet. They don’t have feet. It was close to the end of the evening so I eventually got her off the phone by telling her that her salesperson had gone home for the day (true) and that I’d have her call her back tomorrow (also true.) So this lady is claiming to have received a recliner that doesn’t exist that had a broken part that the recliner that doesn’t exist doesn’t have, and is angry because we sent her the recliner she ordered instead of a nonexistent one.
Anyway, I got her off the phone.
And then my manager, who’d been listening behind me, started laughing and filled me in on what was really going on. You see, the manufacturer offers that recliner as a power recliner. But my store doesn’t sell it that way. And they’d shipped us a power recliner by accident. There is no way for us to order one, and the customer originally ordered a regular recliner like I’d thought, and has either forgotten about that or was lying about it.
(She certainly didn’t pay for one. She paid $X, and a power recliner would therefore be at least $X + 100.)
So, yeah. Good luck to my co-worker tomorrow in sorting that one out.
And now it’s 53 hours and five days. Breakfast this morning was a Snickers bar and half a pot of coffee. I considered adding a couple of cigarettes on top for a truly balanced breakfast but then remembered I don’t smoke.
The whole morning was jitteriness and is this the coffee or do I need a Clonazepam type of nonsense, the afternoon was abject fucking death-boredom, and the evening was frantic Jesus we’re understaffed where were you assholes all day craziness.
What I’m getting at is the review of Rachel Caine’s Ink and Bone that I was gonna write is gonna have to wait until tomorrow. Short version: go read it.
G’night.
I was unstoppable today, guys. I interacted with fourteen customers and sold things to eleven of them. My per-ticket could have been better, but after the disaster that was September, it’s nice to feel good at my job for once.
(Note: I have never seen Glengarry Glen Ross in its entirety. Or even any part other than that one. But I’ve seen that clip a million times.)
Now, that said, selling furniture and furniture-related products and services to strangers was basically all my day consisted of. My wife and I have discovered Black Mirror, and we’re watching the second episode of the first season right now. I’m sure I’ll have stuff to say about that in the near future, because so far the show is damn impressive.
I have a decent chance at a record week if I have a good Sunday. So, like, come out and buy things. Expensive things. I will get money and you will have expensive things. Ain’t that America?
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