It’s a picture of the summer flowers poking up through the wire mesh bed of my trailer. I’ve been intending for some time now to construct a heavy-duty box on top of it. Meanwhile let the green grass grow. Those little yellow flowers seem to bloom all summer long.
I’ve given Cancer Steve a deadline to get his stuff. It is not the four months instead of one that we agreed on, or the money he promised and didn’t pay, but the fact that every time we bump into each other at Fred’s he starts asking me what is in this or that box. When I don’t remember, he acts like I’m holding out on him or something. I told him we never agreed to having these conversations, so get your things and be done with it. Sorry it came to that.Also, he keeps saying there were many pairs of shoes, and there were not when I got there. Instead of leaving it alone, he is digging at the angle that if I don’t remember exactly what I packaged up, then my memory must be faulty, thus my judgment is faulty and therefore I overlooked his ten pairs of shoes. I told him I’d had enough of such talk, where do you want me to dump your gear.
It was a day with doggie wigs. Didn’t I tell everyone months ago the work is going to begin going in circles unless a system is designed to keep it on track? There is an on-line store in New Jersey that wants to retail the wigs and have us drop-ship them. We have nobody in place trained for that, even if they pay for it. The repetitious inquiries from customers and resellers also pushes for a small catalog. Pay for it now or later. We cannot just send a prospective reseller a bunch of attachments and expect them to write their own ad copy.
There has also been a long gap of silence from Indonesia. I sent three emails today seeking responses to questions asked months ago. It seems we are no closer to making sales with these wigs than early last month when the stock arrived. I know the original plan was to have all the marketing moves in place and just turn on the tap as soon as we had inventory. The fact that was not done does not look good for those who were responsible, let me tell you.
If I have time, I will read a book on marketing. Earlier in life, from an accounting perspective I studied things like product life cycles. I have no idea what a marketer is supposed to do but it had better involve getting things sold. I see now that Dave, the guy hired to do all this, must have worked in a big operation. He knows one part of it very well, but not the start-to-finish details. When you place an ad, you have to answer the phone calls or at the minimum, delegate the work. It turns out there were mailing campaigns I did not know about until I discovered unanswered emails. Things like that.
Later, I was in the shop to help Fred edit a document. I took my time and did a meticulous job since I was thinking about an earlier phone call to Sharlene. Although I told her y’day I would call at 7:00 p.m. today, she seemed surprised as if I’d called her in the middle of something. She shouts into the phone and seems to have trouble staying on one subject. The shouting could be that there always seems to be a loud rumbling and hissing noise in the background, like she is standing next to a geyser. That idea was that I drive over and get her so we can go to the bookstore, as planned.
Instead she goes into this big story of how she drives the ugliest van in the world, except she can’t drive it because she has to pay some kind of fees first. Then she said something I find highly suspect, that she was trying to contact “her family” for the money to pay these fees so she could get the van registered and move back [to I don’t know where]. You move wherever you want, but if you are over 50 and still need your family for money to move, I don’t think you are my type at all.
There were other telltale things off perpenzontal with her, not at all the same impression I got when she was in the shop. She has a severe case of hearing what she wants instead of what you said. It’s the kind of thing that is no big deal at first, like pregnancy I suppose. I found myself having to repeat things several times before she could grasp what I meant. You have to nail it down, you don’t let it go or else. For example, I’ve had to tell her at least a half dozen times that my bicycle is not for sale. I also got the impression she had been drinking. When the cell link dropped off, I did not call back.
Here’s something unusual. During a conversation today I mentioned one of the reasons I like music is because you get paid and you “just stand there and play, you don’t have to think or nothing”. Wow, that last part had an extreme impact on the listeners, for obvious reasons no names said. But it is true for me, playing music is one of the times when I don’t think. Apparently some people have the impression that if you are smart or educated, that you are constantly thinking all the time. Well, I mean thinking hard. I don’t mean like that Russian game where the winner is the first person not to think of a bear.
I mean creative or problem-solving thought. Reasoning and forming new ideas is something I doubt even geniuses would enjoy doing all the time. I’ve met quite a number people who don’t understand that deductive thinking is a process, and as such can be turned on and off. They generally confuse the random memories that pop into their own heads with “thinking”, and some of them have near photographic memories. It is astonishing until you ask them to make a decision or interpret what they recall. I can’t speak for others, but if I am going to, say, program or do research, I regularly schedule the time at which I will begin thinking. If I am tired, I will put it off.
Trivia. I have at least one authority [a leff professor] who concurs with my analysis of the “Scientific Method”. Most people assume it was a great good thing that happened a few hundred years ago and brought wealth and prosperity to those who embraced the concept. Yes, but did you know another reason it was so important? Until the 1400’s, you could be burned at the stake for proposing new ideas. Each major new idea had to be passed by the Pope, who rejected such devil-worshipping lunacies like the Earth being round.
That means all progress had to be cleared by the establishment, or it was heresy. When science came along, it did not attempt to go against anything religious. It asked what and not why. This did not always succeed, ask Galileo and Copernicus, but generally, science “got away” with progress because the religions of the day could not bring it to a showdown. The scientists were just not asking the right questions.
The Scientific Method sidestepped the religious confrontations that burned new ideas at the stake. Did you know they estimate 800,000 people were burned alive by the church, mostly ugly old women. Nowadays, we draw the process out by letting them become civil servants.
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