Greetings, long time no sea pirates!!!!

I’m currently listening to a Jimmy Buffett LIVE concert on Radio Margaritaville ~ so far so good. St Somewhere, Boat Drinks, Weather With You – three songs into it. It’s also a jazz night in New Orleans and… MAY THE FORTH BE WITH YOU. Ha.

I have been so, so, so busy. So. Darn. Busy. All week. So many things have happened that it feels like last week was a month.

Where have I been and what have I been doing?

Let’s just start with Wednesday. So some work things led up to us just getting so busy that things were blowing up and we decided that we needed to hire someone else. Well, Dan was the one who wrote up the job description and the more I looked at it, I was like.. “Hey.. I really want to do that.” He looks at me like, “Okay, well we need to decide if you want to do this before I post the ad.” We talked to our boss, and he thought it was a good idea, soooooo you’re looking at TJSS’s newest Customer Service Relations Manager person. Yeah, titles really don’t mean much in a smaller business… but that’s the JOB I’m doing now (plus other stuff still).

Day 1-3 I took time trying to dig into finding customer problems (which is 90% of that job) and trying to solve them. We DID post a Craigslist ad for simple ‘answering phones, customer work, counter help, etc’ and got soooooooooooo many resumes to our email and phone calls from it. Scheduled some interviews and that’s all entitled to say about that.

Wednesday afternoon we had this gigantic rain that just didn’t stop – and it was the first rain I’d driven my new car, Sir Edward Hookmobile II, in it… so Thursday morning, everything appeared to work as I pulled out of the street at home and then I started driving. All of the gauges stopped working, and something told me NOT to stop the car… so I drove to work, when I got there, I turned off the car and started it again. Yep. It wouldn’t even start. The ABS, ACR, battery, check engine lights were all on.. but that was it.

Thursday, S & I went and represented our company at one of our everyday vendors. Our boss bought lunch for them, so we joined them and chatted for about an hour with them. They’re all cool people over there and it was fun getting to see the rest of their building. We got back to work and I had to participate in round one of interviews.

Dan and I left early that afternoon to go eat with his mom, who had been in town all week, and we had a good time eating at Dockside Dave’s in Madeira Beach. That night was a long night.

Friday was a long day as well. So many things popped up with problems at work, phone calls, late orders and round two of interviews.

So today is Saturday and we went out to do a few errands today but man.. let me just tell you, I am so so so so so soooooo exhausted. I didn’t get to bed till late, slept till 8 am, got up to only fall asleep on the couch, went to run errands, came home and slept a few more hours. Getting no sleep and running around at work is killing me.

Unfortunately, I have had to put my personal life on hold again because of work… so I haven’t worked on the book in a few days and I NEED TO REALLY BADLY. But… making sure to be caught up in my new job responsibilities so I can go back to having a normal life again seems much better than letting things get out of hand.. soo….

Just sitting here thinking about something.

I have been through a ton of jobs within this company. NOT a bad thing – good thing – and good thing to put on a resume and have experience in especially how I want this to definitely be the last company I work with under someone else that’s not me. In a few years, when I’m ready, I am definitely going to be doing my own thing.

But anyway, here’s a list of either titles or jobs I’ve done that’s been shifted around:

At the VERY beginning of this, I started out being the eBay lister. We started shipping out 10ish packages a week. So I was also the shipper, invoice typer, and administrative person since I was the only other one doing this.

When we were THINKING of a store location, eBay stuff, I got to help develop business plans, learn some stuff about that, set up the business, start my marketing and designing the logo .. and I’m sure more.

When we got a store location, I was THE invoice person, customer contact (mostly), took care of eBay, listed items, shipped the items, took the items to the post office, packer for those items, became the marketer and designer for official, helped more with parts, the photographer and several other little things.

In May of last year, we finally hired someone to do the shipping (thank God) because I was becoming overwhelmed especially since we had grew in packages… so that was off my plate except for final night paperwork. So then, all of eBay became mine, I did the graphics and marketing, social networking, etc. same as above.

Now a year later, I still have the responsibilities of marketing and designing – but – I am now the customer service relations person taking care of problems via website/eBay/calls/etc, doing a little bit of helping in the hiring process, more business-y decisions, typing invoices, full control of ordering from one of our vendors, and almost all eBay listing is now off my plate just because it’s more automated and less time consuming. So some of that went away.

After all of that… It seems I have been around (LOL) but I am better off now than I ever was and thank goodness for all of this experience… and for a job that I love a lot.

That. Is. All.

Now! Off to work on my book!