Mayalaen

Granted I shouldn’t have texted them while they were off, so this is partly my fault. I forget that people need to be handled and you can’t just give them info when they’re not ready to receive it.

The shop is closed today. We’ve been advertising for 2 weeks we’d be closed today and it’s been on the red bar at the top of the website since last night.

But at noon I got an angry customer who was sitting in the parking lot wondering why we weren’t there and who started texting me on the website’s chat system.

I said I was sorry and that we did advertise the closure but that some people missed it and would you like me to cancel your order and refund and here let me give you a $15 off coupon for your next order.

She’s still pissed but I did my best. Several other customers are pissed too but I managed to calm them down.

I texted Charlie and Marissa about how next time we close the shop for a day, we should notify everyone who did a pickup order and hasn’t picked it up yet that we’re going to be closed. Just an email to notify them so they don’t drive all the way to the shop to find us closed if they missed the closure notifications.

The reason the shop is closed is Marissa’s half-sister is getting married today.

Someone with tact would probably wait until they were home to text, but we always text whenever we’re thinking about something so we don’t forget. I figured if they were that busy they’d ignore the text and check when they got home. We do the same thing in the middle of the night – knowing if the person is asleep they’ll answer us when they get up. No big deal right?

Apparently I should’ve waited. Or never said anything at all?

Charlie sent me a several page-long rant and has texted several times since yelling about how we should be able to have our own lives and why do we have to give discounts for something we warned about and Marissa is texting about why do we have to do this and like…

I don’t get it?

What’s so horrible about trying to manage customers. Customers are unreasonable and pissy, but people like dependability in a store. Charlie and Marissa would be pissed if they did a pickup order at Walmart and went there only to find out it was closed and they missed the memo about it being closed for the day.

Why am I the asshole?

Am I the asshole?

Back before I owned my own business my memory was TOTALLY awesome.

My immediate recall was fantastic and my mid recall was almost totally fantastic and my long-term was fairly good too.

But not anymore. And the more shop stuff on my plate, the worse my memory gets.

I try to keep a to-do list, but when I forget to put things on the to-do list, I’m screwed.

Today I realized 5 things didn’t get put on it because

1) a customer emailed me to ask “did you do this yet?” - “this” would be sending a PayPal request for money for products she asked for 2 weeks ago. I’m sending her an extra tube of the stuff free and giving her free shipping to make up for it

2) charlie resent a pic of a hydraulic chair I was supposed to contact the company about

3) both my parents got calls from Walgreens saying their prescriptions would get put back unless they picked them up TODAY

4) my west coast rep emailed to ask if I still wanted the big order I submitted but forgot to pay for a week ago

5) one of my manufacturers sent an email begging me to PLEASE fill out my resale license info because the order I submitted 3 weeks ago can’t be sent out until I finish it

I did all the things above today along with other things I needed to do but damn I need to be more on top of this stuff!

Life Lesson for Y’all: DO NOT start your own business. If you’re in a shitty job with a shitty boss but you get to clock out at a certain time and maybe get health benefits and/or vacation time paid or not and you’re thinking man I’d love to be my own boss, rethink it because you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how much a business can take over your life.

To anybody who does own their own business but it hasn’t completely taken over their life, you must be totally awesome! Do you wanna buy my business?

Last night I had one of those all-night dreams that keeps going even if you wake up several times.

Terrorists regularly infiltrated tattoo shops, so all shop owners were kinda like FBI or CIA agents and had a network where they could communicate with other shop owners.

My closest contact was this dude named Angel -- a real life dude who used to a shop owner and will hopefully be moving into my shop soon. Angel looks so badass nobody messes with him.

My dreams are choppy and jump around a lot, but at one point there was a terrorist infiltration at a shop and we both went to investigate, but we had to communicate by landline, so we kept stopping and running into this upside down room the size of a broom closet to call on one of those old rotary phones and it was SO annoying.

To get out of the room, we had to sink through the floor and we’d pop out wherever we wanted to be.

I kept sinking out the room before I was done talking with Angel.

So we figure out who in the shop is a terrorist, but we can’t find the guy. We know he’s somewhere in the building that has hundreds of rooms, and all the artists in the rooms are clueless as to what’s going on, but we don’t wanna tell them and create a panic.

They don’t notice that we’ve got weapons strapped all over our bodies. Maybe that’s our normal outfits?

We hear an explosion in another part of the building, and I try to get into the broom closet to call Angel, but I can’t even get to the phone because I keep falling through the floor and popping out in a random room.

I kept trying different broom closets with all these different things in them, each one with an old rotary phone, but every time I get close, I fall through the floor.

I finally grabbed onto one of the rotary phones and called Angel and he answered but then I fell through the floor and kept falling because that was the broom closet that sat over the bottomless pit.

I woke up after the first time I smacked into a boulder on the way down.