Yesterday was the first time I broke a sales record on the upside since about March 2002, when I had been in business three months. The big difference is that I'm now selling stuff way below cost.

Bargain hunters. They're a very rude sort of people. I don't particularly like them as customers because they're the human equivalent of vultures. They go on a feeding frenzy whenever somebody sells at a loss (or finds some other way to offer prices lower than anybody else on the planet for a particular item). They mob in and pick apart any good meat and leave the useless scraps for whatever rodents might follow. I might mention that this is a very predictable form of behaviour and the large chain stores are built around this model of shopping.

We're living in a vulture economy. That's scary.

First customer:

Do you have any guitar picks?

Yeah, right over here.

How much are they?

Twenty five cents each.

You have anything cheaper?

Nope.

OK. I take one.

Thanks, next?

Glokpee kwaidong?

'Scuse me...?

Glokpee kwaidong?

I'm not sure... Could you point to something?

Glokpee kwaidong bakwtui!

I'm sorry, but I'm all out of glokpee kwaidongs right now. Next?

My violin won't stay in tune, can you help me?

Sure. (I tune it up without any difficulty). Seems to work just fine.

What are those pegs for?

Those are for tuning the violin. You need to adjust them to keep it in tune.

Really? My teacher never told me that.

Next?

Glokpee kwaidong?

I think your wife was here a few minutes ago. She went that way... Next?

You had a new flute in your window for $9.95 about six months ago. I'd like one.

That was a closeout special. It's long gone.

When you get more?

Never. Next?

And so it goes...

Having a cup while the operating system is being restored on the system that failed yesterday...

Yet another group of folks is scheduled to come out today and gaze at the bubbling brook outside my store and figure out if there's anything they can do about it. The first guys, at great expense - are going to run a series of high-tech tests to figure out where to dig.  The second group might actually start the excavation.

I looked at the dysfunctional hard drive. Western Digital. Gak... Let me tell you something. I've got a drawer full of old hard drives. Some of them go back twenty years. Every single Western Digital drive I've ever owned has failed,  and almost always have failed spectacularly. Most every other drive I've still got, and I can still access them given the right hardware. Draw your own conclusions.

2:00 PM

The operating system has been reloaded. Restored my most critical applications first. First things first... the printer drivers and the web browser. Then use the browser to grab the backups. The rental accounts recovered flawlessly. Then I open my financial account data. The most recent date on record is 2003. Ouch. Two years of lost data. Including this year. But I just backed up this two days ago. How could that be? Perhaps I loaded the wrong backup. I scanned the server directories. There's a problem... I have two versions of the backup on the Unix box. In one, the file extension is lower case. The other is upper case. And it was created two days ago. So I reloaded with the upper case version of the file.

The newest date is still 2003. Now I'm starting to sweat. My finances for the entire year - I don't seem to have them on backup. I check the other server. There's a file from Jan-2005. OK - let me try that one. I'll at least have a little more data than I do now. But I think the bank will only let you download three months into the past. I've still got a big problem. Doesn't look like there's any way to recover most of this year. I'm really sweating now. So I load the file from January. The newest date is still 2003. You'd think I'd be sweating buckets, wouldn't you? But no. Now I breathe a sigh of relief.

You see, I've used that particular backup before (the one from January). I know that it contains more recent information than 2003. The program migrated the data on the first file I used, and stored it somewhere else. It didn't even look at the two other backups I loaded.

So I deleted all the data from the program, and started fresh with the uppercase file from two day's ago. Bingo. Everything is there. Sync with the bank and everything is hunky-dory.

They found the leak. I've got jackhammers going 30 feet from me right now. Should be fixed in another hour. Glad it was outside the store...

 

Boy don't you hate seeing that message? Especially when the computer is making loud clunking noises. It's the book-keeping computer (again). All my business accounts. Guess that's what I get for buying Fry's cheap house brand. So when's the last time I did a backup? Yesterday at 5:21 PM. Phew! That was close... Still this means re-installing an operating system and all my necessary applications. 

Or even when it doesn't rain. There's a puddle of water outside the shoppe. First noticed it a couple of days ago. That's odd. Everything else is dry. How did it get here? Then today I looked closer and noticed that the water was actually bubbling out of a crack in the concrete sidewalk. Uh oh. Broken water line. Right outside the front door of my business. Somebody is going to have to fix it. That means that the sidewalk and tile entry to my store is going to have to be dug up. Can you imagine trying to sell a business while the entryway is being excavated? I doubt you can find this tile anymore - it dates from the thirties. As in nineteen-thirties. They'll probably need to have the water shut off while they're working on it. Which means I'll probably have to close the doors while they're working on it. During Xmas shopping season. My brain is aching from just trying to imagine all the implications. Wonder how long I can go before alerting anybody that this is even happening...

Update:

Of course the situation would get worse. I discovered that it isn't just bubbling water outside the building, my front window 'bay' is flooded as well. Damaged a couple of cellos. So I contacted the landlord's representative. The landlady died last month. The person who inherited the building is in Arizona. The representative told me to call the city.

The city maintenance crew came out. They won't touch it. It's not their problem. So I called the rep again. He got the local Roto-Rooter guy to come out and look. Hmmm, this is going to be a lot of jackhammering. The sidewalk has to go. The front of my building might have to go also. They're not going to touch it. Nobody apparently is going to take any responsibility. I'm stuck in the middle. The front of my business is flooded and nobody is going to fix it. The landlord's rep is claiming that it's my responsibility. But I don't have any authority (not to mention resources) to ask somebody to jackhammer the public sidewalk on Main Street and excavate beneath the front of my store. It's also not my building. I share it with two other businesses. Sigh... Any way you look at it, it's a disaster.

I've been out of contact while coming to grips with the business situation. Any hopes for a holiday boost in sales have been dashed. Yet another worst month on record. Less than half the sales of the previous worst month on record (last month). It's way beyond being a desperate situation. Didn't even cover a significant fraction of operating costs this month. Can't afford to buy even one set of bongo drums for the handful of Christmas shoppers I might get later in the month.

Game over.