Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The Big Move

It's been a little bit since my last post. But life has been very busy here.

We're moving the comic book store to a new location, and will open there tomorrow. There's so much to do and so little time to do it. If you follow me on Twitter, you've seen some of my pictures of the move. I don't have them posted to Flickr yet, but will once it's done. Progress is being made on getting Neptune up to speed at our Moorland Blvd home, but there still is a lot to do. It was a long day yesterday, and today probably won't be much different. Even if we don't get it completely done, we'll be ready for business on Wednesday. And it never would have happened if it weren't for the great customers of ours who made Sunday's big move go so quickly and smoothly. I just can't say thanks enough to that crew. Really great people who gave up their Sunday to sweat for us. I've never seen a move go so smothly.

Thanks to all of our great help that came out on Sunday!!!!!! Everyone really hauled a** and we had the entirety of the store moved in just a few hours. Putting the fixtures back together turned out t o take a little more time, but even that got done in one day, thanks to everyone's help. Now it's just getting all of the inventory counted and put away that seems to be taking forever. LOTS of potential, and LOTS of work to get there.

We're also going to be using a new POS program. The Microsoft RMS program bundled with Diamond's ComicsSuite. The program works - a HUGE step up from what we were using. Of course now we have to do a complete inventory from scratch. Doing an inventory wouldn't have to be difficult, except that about 80% of the graphic novels just show up in a long list that say the same exact thing on the title line. "JLA TP" and "Fables TP" and "Ultimate Spider-Man TP" displays, but no volume numbers, so then Craig calls out a portion of the bar code number and I have to search through the list to find the one that mataches and then fix the title. Sometimes they're in order, but other times they're not, and after a few hours of looking at bar code number strings my eyes and brain start to hurt. Diamond really needs to fix that! In the next 20 minutes before I get to the store to start it again would be great.

Of course you remember my sister had her baby a few weeks back, so I have been helping her when I can. So that has also been occupying my time.

Plus, I'm going to Las Vegas on a bank trip the 27th. It's for a Quiz contest where we could win $10,000 if we know the most bank trivia and win the playoff. There are 5 of us going from my branch. We made it through the first two qualifying rounds, one of only two branches from the entire state going. The team is our branch manager, our assistant manager, myself and two other bankers. I got the spot by placing top in the branches' qualifying quiz-off, so I'm sure to play in the first round in Vegas. There's 221 pages in the Quiz Bowl book that have to be virtually committed to memory so we can win. It's a lot to learn, especially for someone like me who is the newest person to banking on the team. So every free moment I have that isn't taken up by working at the bank or store or by helping my sister I've given to studying for the big contest. Wish me luck!!!

OK, enough of this. Craig's out of the shower and we've gotta head out to get Neptune ready to go.

1 comment:

Sea-of-Green said...

Congrats on getting ready to re-open! I like how the store looks in the photos -- nice and spacious and LIGHT. It doesn't look like a dark, narrow cave like most comic book stores I've seen. :-)