Mayalaen

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but over the last year he’s let it grow and HOLY SHIT IT’S GORGEOUS and I keep getting distracted by it. Ugh. It’s down to just below his shoulderblades and when he lets it free, it’s like... UGH!!

Anyway he was complaining to me today because for the first day after he washes his hair, it won’t stay in a ponytail, especially when he’s running.

So I asked him if he knew how to tease his hair. Said he knew OF it but not how to do it and “what does that have to do with a ponytail? Isn’t it to make your hair big?”

After a quick explanation, he was stoked and can’t wait to try it tomorrow.

“It’s going to be SO COOL when I can run without losing my hair bands!”

:D

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 :\

In the past three months, my online store has been “hacked” three times. Because of what they’re doing, it means I have to take down everything and rebuild a lot of stuff (for reasons I won’t go into because it would take way too long to type it out -- suffice to say SQL injectors and fun stuff).

I found a way around the major rebuilding, so that’s cool, but in the meantime I thought hey why don’t I just go with Shopify or some other place that takes care of a lot of stuff for you if you pay them a subscription fee?! Sounds great right?!

Except even when it’s completely legal to buy and sell skin care products, lidocaine, and CBD-based products (not even for ingestion, but just topical), Shopify and those other places shut you down. I read the terms and conditions before I ever signed up, and I didn’t see anything I thought applied to me. I’m not selling actual medical supplies. I’m not selling products you ingest. I’m not even selling things you need any sort of license for.

Basically they’re shutting everyone down not because it’s illegal.
Not because there’s a high risk involved.
But rather because the payment gateway they use DOESN’T LIKE IT.
They just don’t like perfectly legal substances even when it’s topical.

So after spending five days transferring hundreds of my products to Shopify, they sent me an email saying I violated terms, blah blah. After reading more about it, I realized that, if they wanted to, they could take issue with every single thing I sell because it could all be considered “pseudo pharmaceutical” and not allowed.

What it comes down to is that I can take the risk of going with them and just using third-party payment gateways (that I have to pay for and set up separately), I decided to just forget Shopify and stick with my own online store.

So I’m putting in a lot of new features. Before we only could accept PayPal online, but now we’ve got Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square/Credit and Debit, Amazon Pay, Venmo, etc.

I also signed us up with FedEx. We only had USPS and UPS before. I’m thinking about adding DHL, but I’m not sure yet.

I also got three new distributorships in the last couple weeks, so I need to put all those new products into our online store. That’s taking a while. Cool thing is, the ink company I mentioned on here the other day and got all excited over is REALLY good on social media and they already tagged and promoted us!

Since I signed up for Square, I thought I may as well put one of their readers in my shop. The company I currently use doesn’t accept things like Apple/Amazon/Google Pay, so with the new reader we can take pretty much any kind of payment our customers want.

I also put the Square app on all our phones, so we can take payment no matter where we are, whether we have the little reader or not.

It’s all SO MUCH WORK and last night I was so tired that I started to fall asleep while I was eating dinner. My mom poked at me and was like “I think you need to go to bed.”

I’m still working on it today, so I’m probably going to do the same thing tonight with the falling asleep while eating :P