Mayalaen

I’ve had to have Discussions with Evan and Kim (piercing apprentice) about Kim’s behavior and how it should be dealt with because Evan is NOT good at being the tough guy (he lets her do stuff she shouldn’t and then thinks being pissy and telling her to not come in for a few days will make her realize she’s done something wrong without him explaining), but of course because people are sensitive, so I couldn’t just throw them both in the office and talk. Had to be Kim, then Evan, then Kim again, and Evan again. Ugh. Evan is super emotional, so he teared up more than once during the discussions.

That same day Ash had a meltdown. He doesn’t handle real-life stuff well since his accident, and he’s trying to get on disability, but when they told him he’d get $700 a month he flipped out because “how am I supposed to take care of my kids and me on $700 a month?!” I told him it’s a really good number, especially for someone who has NEVER paid taxes and is in his 20s. Yeah, it sucks that disability doesn’t cover living expenses, but would you rather have $700 a month or nothing? So I talked to him for quite a while about how to handle it, what to do, pointing out that he’ll still have his tattoo income and that’ll pay for living expenses, etc. He was crying at me when he first came in, but left with a smile on his face.

Next Ryan came in. He didn’t cry at me, but he needed reassurance on things and was doing the “what am I doing with my life?” thing and “why aren’t I more busy even though I don’t want to promote myself?!” thing AGAIN. So I talked with him for 1.5 hours.

Then one of my regular customers came in with a personal thing that’s been going on, and I guess I seemed like the person to vent to because he teared up and started telling me all about his shit too.

That was a couple days ago. Yesterday I had to talk to Kim and Evan again, and Evan cried again. Had another long talk with Ryan. Had a 15-minute talk with Ash because he wanted to tell me all the things he’s doing to smooth things over with the disability thing.

And then my family decides we need to have a shop meeting because they want us to start up a delivery service for the tattoo shops on the other side of the city. I mean it’s a really good idea because the only two supply shops out that way suck and people hate them, but damn all of us are so busy all the time and it’s just one more thing. A big thing.

The online store is getting busier all the time, especially now that I’ve made it so we can accept ANY kind of payment system instead of just P/ayPal.

So we’re going to get some coolers together and get Kat (a friend my cousin and I grew up with who is also helping us out with the social media thing because we all suck at being social) is going to start doing runs out to those areas.

I’m hoping we can keep up with demand, especially if shop owners start ordering from us because they’ll likely order huge amounts at a time.

Oh! And I mentioned a couple weeks ago I got distributorships from like four or five new places? Well I’ve landed another three!! I don’t know why these companies that have always been hard to get a hold of and wouldn’t give me distributorships in the past are changing their minds (maybe just continually bugging them shows I really want it?), but whatever it is, this is really cool.

Now I just have to get my uncle and his wife to stop spending so much money so I can put more money toward building up stock at the shop, especially from the new manufacturers I’m an official distributor for!

So lots of good and some bad things, very tiring things. Oh, and my lungs are doing better, but not quite good enough to do yard work. Tried to help my mom move some stuff around out back yesterday and had to sit down every few minutes because my lungs were burning :\

Last week I whined about a script injector trashing my online store and other sites (I have a total of 15 between the shop, my family, and friends). The script injector took advantage of a weak spot in the Wordpress code I had on one of the sites. But the biggest problem was my uncle and the browser hijacker he had on his computer.

I texted him, told him what I found on his account on the shop computer (and that most likely he had it on his home computer too) and told him to stop signing into bank accounts, our online store backend where he fills orders that come in, and any of his real estate stuff.  Told him to run a virus scan and Malwarebytes and tell me if anything came up (he knows how to do both).

I thought he read and paid attention to the texts, but that was stupid of me. He does this all the time. He reads it when he feels like it, and if he’s having one of his I-can’t-face-the-world-so-I’m-gonna-lay-in-bed-for-3-days-straight things, he won’t read anything. He also doesn’t read them once he feels better.

But if HE has stuff in between that he wants to talk about, he’ll respond, so the convo about his client’s house being sold and $150,000 of the client’s money sitting in one of our accounts that was discussed within minutes of me sending the “you have a hijacker,” well yeah he WANTED to talk about that so he responded, but ignored the hijacker thing.

So he’s been banking, doing his real estate stuff, and logging into the online store with his home computer. All while we have his client’s $150,000 sitting in one of our bank accounts.

Two days ago I found out he hadn’t paid any attention to my texts about the hijacker that day, so I freaked the fuck out thinking the info had been sent to some random hacker and they were gonna drain the $150,000 account and fuck with all the others. We have EVERYTHING in these accounts.

If somebody got a hold of it, they would have control of all our money/accounts, all our business accounts (my family and I all own our own businesses and between us we run 5 businesses), both our houses, three clients’ houses (my uncle is in real estate), and our credit ratings (there are four of us involved total).

So I was ready to take him and my mom down to the bank to freeze the money (we’re all signers in case something happens to one or more of us) and all the accounts.

That was Monday, and the banks were closed, so I drove over to my uncle’s house to see what I could do with his computer. Thankfully he didn’t have the hijacker on his home computer, so we all breathed a sigh of relief.

But then later that day I started working on my websites again, going into the backend through FTP, and ALL 15 sites were again full of malicious scripts and other shit again. I was SO confused! I had changed all the passwords, informed our hosting service, and had cleaned EVERYTHING and rebuilt our entire online store again (yeah that didn’t take long).

Well it turns out he also had messed with his wife’s laptop, which he never does! Marissa isn’t a techie, so she’s super cautious and never goes anywhere even remotely dangerous, rarely uses tech anyway. I’ve never had to fix anything of hers other than hardware failure. But she called me and said her laptop browser looked funny, so I went over and sure enough the same hijacker on my uncle’s side of the shop computer was on her laptop.

I asked him about it and yup, he’d been using her laptop because the laptop is in the same room with some shipping supplies at his house, and he didn’t feel like walking upstairs to his own computer.

So now I have to rebuild/clean up all 15 websites again, including our online store.

Does anybody wanna adopt a few family members from me?! I’ll actually pay you to take them, and they’re hard workers, they’re just stubborn and ridiculous and prone to drama. If you put them on a leash and don’t listen to their whining, they’ll work hard for you.

I’ve been super busy this last week, and I though I’d be coherent enough to hang around on Tumblr and other social media platforms, relaxing and having fun tonight, but I’m about to head to bed.

So here’s a Bad News/Good News post in case you wondered what my insane family is up to lately.

• Andre overflowed the toilet in the upstairs bathroom at my uncle’s house so bad that my uncle had to tear the ceiling out in the room below (keep in mind that Andre has been told before not to leave a toilet go but he’s too impatient and doesn’t want to so yeah he’s in trouble)
• mom caught Carol in my bedroom looking through my drawers on the second day she started living with us
• I caught Carol going into my bathroom and stopped her (she’s not allowed in my rooms/bathroom because of her obsession/stalking issues with me and I don’t want to know what she was going in there for)
• mom had a very strong seizure today and declared “my head is a world!"
• Marissa accidentally took the snack machine keys home in her pocket (does it all the time and we’ve been trying to get her to stop) and we thought they were lost so 1.5 weeks after they were lost and we’d searched everywhere, I got the lock replaced and two new keys for $96 and less than 24 hours later Marissa found the keys in her jacket like wtf WHY DIDN’T YOU LOOK NOT LOOKING COST ME $96!!!
• the new guy I hired a few weeks ago to work at the shop found out his girlfriend was cheating on him and he moved back to Oregon and damn I liked his personality and he was a really good artist
• Diana is still going batshit insane -- Marissa’s grandfather was in an accident, so both Marissa’s parents are halfway across the country taking care of him while Diana is wasted and picking fights with her downstairs neighbor and possibly getting arrested tonight and put on an involuntary psych hold (no idea how this will turn out)
• Charlie (who is also a real estate agent) is trying to sell a house for a woman who has an alcoholic ex who is living in the house (because she feels bad for him) and it’s making it really hard for my uncle to sell the house because the guy keeps getting wasted and collapsing somewhere in the house and pissing/shitting himself and Charlie ended up dragging the guy into the spare bedroom and locking the door just so he could show the house to a family

• all the product I ordered from Korea came without any problems YAY!!! i didn’t waste $3000 on something that never came :D
• I don’t have to go into the shop again until Friday!
• my brain is doing fairly well thanks to what i'm going to talk about below :)