Jim, the chiropractor, called. He wants lessons and he has a group of six people together. We meet at his house as soon as he confirms the day. He also says that he wants to join in the lessons, which I suppose is okay. Believe it or not, adults learn much faster than children, and barring civil servants, generally have longer attention spans.He is associated with the school board. I’ve already figured out this is the pilot case, so I quoted him my 1993 figure of $75 per hour. Group classes tend to move a lot slower and I pair them off depending on ability, so I can work with that. To teach formally, the price is $120,000 per school year. That’s eight months, folks. Oh, and I don’t do meetings.
That reminds me of the G. He recognized he does not stand a chance and pretended he “quit” posting his lame rebuttals. The crew tells me that he was bluffing when he said he knew who we were. I can explain that. The crew assumes everybody is stupid, while I only assume they are stupider than I am. According to them, it is entirely possible that the G really has no idea how to trace identities on CL. Is anybody that stupid? That would mean that all along, he really did not know it was us, and dug himself in too deep.
Good, one day I’ll tell the G that I make three times as much per hour teaching music that he does. The guy honestly thinks he is some kind of expert on the topic. Of course, I let him think it so long he likely considers it fact. Anyway, I’m gearing up for the group lesson in a week, so I’m canceling other lessons until that time. Get me in with that school board and I’ll move to Boca Raton.
Jay-Jay also called. We may get out to a ball game on Thursday. I have not even seen one in probably thirty years. The weather report is more exciting. He needs a ride and I can use the break. It is also school board activity, so who knows? It is up in Ft. Lauderdale, on Oakland Park Blvd. That means I put new tires on the soon, if not tomorrow. Hey, to me even that is more exciting than most sports.
The cat is driving me crazy. Do female cats get “that way”? She is 100% healthy, frisky and well-fed. But some kind of weird nature is in progress that I do not understand, except that I know it is Spring. No way am I letting her out the door for even a moment acting like she is. Strutting around with everything up in the air, meowing like crazy. I sure hope Steve didn’t get five years or something.
This doing business half-way around the world is still not as automated as the free trade talk would have us believe. There are many delays and barriers besides the sheer obstacles of language and tradition. A chunk of today had to be focused on the definitional differences between small, medium and large. As predicted, we have a database and the factory does not. When I scan the meta-information, I see that we have maintained a 100% level of replies and every file we have is up to date.
The people overseas are falling behind. They have just begun to realize that sending us an email with a complicated question does not buy them any time. Not that this is wrong, in fact, it is normal. It is just that the tactic will not work in this case. An example of potentially bad divergence was the sizes, for the terms are relative.
I hauled out the majority of the counter-samples and measured. Small is now defined as 5,0 cm or less, and so on. No, that is not a typo, MS. Asia uses a decimal comma. Left alone, the medium size of one model could have been the same size as the large of another. Remind me to find a metric ruler since nobody else seems to understand the conversion formulas.
There are also strange delays over ways of communicating. We do get, as just said, the odd question that has an element of stalling in it. Instead, they get more information than requested. This is intentional. I once sent them a 14 column report to show how and why we had reached a specific figure. No such exactitudes come back this way. Another thing I’ve learned is that they will often assume telling you something means you will automatically do the next thing in sequence.
This is not to imply if you don’t do it, you don’t know how, but the effect is there. We don’t do it because telling me something is just and only that. Action is different, and if I’m not paid to take the action, I need authorization. The operation is overall quite smooth considering these type of factors. I reported to the boss that we were on or slightly ahead of schedule in all departments. I might add that she was in her prime with at least five things going on at once all day. I tend to arrange things to be the opposite, but Ruth plainly thrives on deadlines and the busy hum of headquarters.
