6:15am: Arrived at work and began the week by checking the special order emails and fixing the special order mistakes from the weekend, then I sent the orders to Ingram. Mondays are particularly dreadful and this took me almost two hours. It does not include the time spent researching special orders not available from Ingram, that’s on the docket for tomorrow morning.
At 8:15 I turned my attention to the orders for the business office customers and spent the next two and a half hours on the phone with publishers and clients. Big price quote this morning, 300 copies each of ten different books, totaling just over $22,000. Let’s see how much of it they end up ordering.
From 10:45 to 11:15 I fixed data entry errors and played Big Brother, looking at discounts given and sales that didn’t make sense, there hasn’t been a 100% discount in a long time, but we still need to look for them.
Lunch was from 11:15 to 11:45 and I was only interrupted twice while eating last night’s leftover pasta and reading Predictably Irrational, it’s interesting and I hope to finish it this week. Two interruptions are not bad for a Monday lunchbreak.
After lunch it was more work on business office orders and I did some brief training with Elisa, if I can get her up to speed on purchase orders and field purchase orders it will take a nice load off my desk. I got a twenty minute break from that when Dave interrupted me to talk about the website and advertising with him and Kendra and then it was back to the book orders.
It’s the start of the school year and educators are stepping up their orders. At a little after two in the afternoon, Barb Bryson from Valdez called to thank me for processing her Battle Book order so quickly and said I was doing a great job. I had put in my eight hours and decided to leave at that high point.
There’s still plenty of work left on my desk, and it’ll never all be done, so I’m working towards accepting incompleteness and not stressing out over work left undone. What else would I have to do tomorrow if I didn’t have anything left over from today?
This old-school credit slip is almost ten years old. The Shopper’s Forum location closed five years ago. Maria, who was the original clerk on the slip is now the manager. Needless to say, the customer had misplaced it for several years. The great thing is, they never expire. My credit slip is pretty recent by comparison. I traded in a whole bunch of books this weekend and needed a new one, so the first entry on mine is 08/01/09. How about you? Can you beat Linda’s ten-year-old slip? If so, what’s been keeping you from comin’ in to see us?