One year ago today: June 12, 2018, on sale forty bucks.
Five years ago today: June 12, 2014, my average is 300.
Nine years ago today: June 12, 2010, we’re closing the shop.
Random years ago today: June 12, 2013, bad people join dating clubs.
An abandoned mid-Tennessee barn, it makes a wonderful blog photo. It’s also the high point of the day, so enjoy. We passed a number of these on our Elmwood hin und zurűck. All situated well back on private property, probably wise. This is along the routes that the Garmin millennial-grade GPS sought to avoid. Which comedian said that Google or the Internet must be female. Because whenever you say something, it tries to complete the sentence for you. Ha! Notice in the photo the amount of shameless self-promotion. Hey, on the barn I mean.
I watched how things could sometimes go to rack and ruin if they were not regularly maintained, and besides laziness, I wondered what caused that. Why did our neighbor keep a perfectly good tractor in a lean-to in his outback until it rusted away to nothing. And I discovered a large component of that was that people often buy things without proper regard to the true cost of ownership. Ah, I just saw that. Outback has nothing to do with Australia, it is an American word that refers to the space between the house and an outbuilding, usually the shitter. That’s your trivia. What, you want more? Okay, another thing that’s not connected to Australia is Outback Steak House. It’s a chain of Florida restaurants.
So when it comes to the beer box, I bring along an extensive history of calculating what things really cost. Go to your state’s web page of business registrations and notice how few startups are in operation even a year later. Two years, then five years. Extinction is the norm. In places like Florida you can tell when there’s been a hurricane.
Meanwhile, let’s grab lunch. Here’s a picture of dessert. It’s another vanilla pie fresh out of the oven. What? You’re right, there is a slice missing. You must have blinked. Last evening, on the way back from a grocery run, I stopped in at Shooters to see the lovely Shay. She is put to work thinking of a snappy name for the beer box. I may lack imagination and have so far done 100% of the work on this project by myself, but face it, Glen, I do have some the best-looking help in Nashville on my side.
Australian time zones.
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So, I tackled the beer box again with renewed vim and vigor. To date, I was mostly concerned with the costs of material. It amounts to cedar fence panels and wood screws. In accounting parlance, these are called DM for direct materials. What I’m doing is looking more closely. To be exact, direct materials are a variable cost. The more you build, the more you use. The building costs are known as labor, and today I was beginning to look at indirect costs. Those are mostly overhead, that is, expenses that do not go into the product itself.
Some are straightforward, like saw blades, drill bits, and carpenter’s pencils. Others are less easy to spot. Like where and how much storage space? Here is a list of what I was considering today:
Vehicle costs -- somebody has to drive a car to get materials, which means gas, maintenance, insurance, registration, and repairs, you get the idea.
Wastage – each cut turns 1/8th inch of cedar into sawdust, which at this time is wasted and must be disposed of, which involves the expense or time of collecting it.
Efficiency – careful attention here, as this is largely determined by experience, of which we have none yet. For example, while each caddy is designed to be cut from a single fence panel, there is a section left over. Can this be reduced by cutting duplicate pieces from a larger number of boards at a time. Can the number of saw passes be lowered, is it better to have one drill and change bits, or two drills?
Selling costs – the usual way of counting ending inventory (and the seller pays a wholesale price for whatever isn’t there) is fine if you have accountable vendors. I’m not even considering that in this day and age. If them bastards can steal 19,000,000 identities a year, they can sure as hell yard off with your hard work. That means on-line, and I’ve already made some design changes so that the pieces, selling as a kit, will all fit in one standard shipping box. You should see a picture of one nearby, showing that no matter how the parts are arranged, there was a tiny bit that would not fit.*
These tie together toward what looks like a minimum-cost way to do business, and that is often a huge component of the process. In this case, it is anticipation of costs, to minimize surprises. I know there is an old shed unused in the outback in Tennessee. (What? That’s a legitimate use of the term, Ken.) Here is a closeup of the packing problem. No matter how the pieces were fit into this cardboard box, that tiny 1/4 cubic inch of wood could not be made to fit. And the next size box up doubles the shipping cost. Any hardware pieces would fit into the other cavities in this box.
ADDENDUM
JeePee, pet turtle of the year. Those who say reptiles don’t become attached pets should spend an hour with this little guy. They have some deep-rooted instinct about interacting though I’d be careful about anthropomorphisms. Here’s his majesty relaxing in the pool after a pretty full meal of carrot, cucumber, lettuce, and corn. Which brings me to another topic, and it is English. I finished reading the Patagonia book and it was stuffed with every cliché that would fit. The writing also changes at Chapter 26, slightly over halfway through. Allow me to explain.
At Chapter 26 what happened seems obvious to me. The author went back over the material with a Thesaurus at hand. Then replaced a lot of the words with what was supposed to be more flowery language. If you ask me, this is a type of poor beginner’s attempt. You see, it breaks up that natural beat of the sentences and many a time, the substituted word lacks or changes the color. To a writer like me, this is rough reading because I sense the original word and realize I’ve got one stereotyped author on my hands.
Do my sentences have a detectable style? Indeed. I regularly contrive hyphenated words to get a meaning across. My typical paragraph has three sentences of equal ‘gravity’ and if there are more, it is mainly for emphasis of some sort. If you go back in this blogs evolution, you can identify entire posts with a stilted style. That’s likely when the post was redacted from calendar notes and similar sources, where I tend to use an almost different vocabulary and cut topics short. Certainly not the conversational style you are reading at this time.
I would not recommend this book or anything made from it. For the equivalent time, you could read something much better. Like your old comic book collection.
*the problem was solved by redesigning one of the divider pieces by using the cutout from a slightly larger handle hole, which in turn weakens the handle some, but how much I dunno. This seat-of-the-pants development is where you’ll get no free help. Nobody around here, including myself, has any experience at this kind of thing, but I think you can guess the cost of having anyone solve these problems for you is terrifying. And, with the way things are heading, about to get a lot worse. Prices are soaring everywhere.
