I've gotta tell you guys, as I sit here at 1:30 AM on the right coast, it has been some day!
***Super quick disclaimer, the following words may come off as "complainey" or "whiney" I assure you they aren't meant in that context and that as insane as the previous 24 hours have been, they were worth it. So if you don't want to read my mindless rambling (who could blame you) then I'll get the SALE DETAILS out right up front.
Use offer code "Deal" for 20% Off ANYTHING in the store. Just make us an offer 20% lower than our current ask and put code "DEAL" in the comments and we'll accept.
I now return you to our regularly scheduled ramble session... enjoy!
I'm normally not one to complain, so I won't start now, as on the whole it was a fantastic day for the mighty ACC, but certainly not one I'll soon forget.
Little known fact about yours truly, before I ran the internet's finest comic book store, I used to manage a Sprint store. I remember the days where we'd release an Iphone, when I would leave the store having just made more $ than I'd normally make in a week or two, but I couldn't help but wonder if it was worth it as I would be so tired that I'd come home and be totally out of it.
I'm sure most of you know what I'm referencing, the state of mind when you do 2, 3, 4, 5 or more tasks than you thought you'd be doing, and at some point, in your mind, you're like "ENOUGH!"
It's like when you were a kid and your mom asked you to take out the trash. Then you did that and sat down to watch your favorite cartoon and the second your cheeks hit the couch you were promptly asked to do the dishes. Guess what, you finished the dishes, go clean your room. Done with that, let's clean out the attic while we're at it!
Well today was that day.
I think most of it stems from expectation. I woke up today knowing that it would be a "busy" day. I had to take the car I just bought into the shop to have a couple of repairs done, coordinate a rental car for the weekend, and I knew I had 2 consignments coming in to drop off today. So I was prepared to be "busy" what I got was a whole other animal.
It started by not going to bed early enough. Note to self, don't start season 4 episode 12 of Orange Is The New Black at 2:00AM, if you don't want to go to bed until 4:00AM. As episode 12 & 13 of Season 4 are AMAZING. No spoilers, it was just fantastic. Easily worth all of the "take it or leave it" aspects of the show, for the truly human moments they're capable of pulling out of thin air from time to time.
So lesson 1.... go to bed before 4AM before a busy day.
Amazingly, I woke up almost on time, and got out of the house running only a few minutes late to drop off the car. Then the most fantastic thing that can happen to you in the middle of a heat wave happened. One of my tires was as flat as a pancake.
I just bought this car, the dealer told me it needed 2 new front tires. Didn't realize it needed them THAT DAY though. Oh well, not the end of the world right, I'll just pop into the trunk in my "newish" used car and grab the jack, lower the spare, and be on my way 15 minutes late. Well..... there was no jack. There was no lug wrench. Luckily, I happened to still have access to another SUV. It had a jack.. and a lug wrench... but the wrench DIDN'T fit. Side note, can we all agree on the cell phone charger model and adopt one set of "lugs" please... uhhh.
SO.. since I now have no way to get the spare lowered or the flat off, I improvise. I ran downstairs to the bike area in my condo building and grabbed a bike air pump, yup.. .this is happening.
I proceeded to pump that tire up until I thought my chest was going to fall off, realizing I had only gotten to about 20PSI (needs about 35-40 I think). Lucklily I had enough air to get over to the nearby gas station, so I quit pumping before I died and filled her up the easy way at the station. Unfortunately by this time I had already sweated through my had & shirt... it was 9:45AM. (Welcome to Atlanta).
So I'm finally on my way, 45 minutes late now, when I pull up to the dealership and get a call from our store manager, he tells me there's someone at the shop with 10 boxes of books to sell.
Which is great! Except for when I'm not there. Knowing my sales guy at the dealership, and knowing that whatever needed to be done wasn't going to be super quick, I popped my head in and told him I'd be back in an hour.
That brings us to collection 1.) highlights, honestly not too many. Pretty nice post Hush Batman run, a couple of Harley Key's, and a smattering of mid-keys from the past 10-ish years. The guy did have some sturdy runs though, about 1000 books in all, all coming your way soon.
I wrap up with the guy and headed back to the dealership (luckily it's only about 5 miles from our warehouse). The dealership took a solid hour to simply check my car in and get to the rental car place, then get the rental, but I didn't have any major snags.
This put me back at the shop at about 2PM. I knew I had a couple of consignment drop offs coming in at 3:30 and 7, so I did my best to sort the 1st collection I'd bought earlier to clear out my mini-sized office so I'd have room for more intake. 3:30 comes and I'm nowhere close to being done. I have books EVERYWHERE.
But in walks collection 2.) Now this one was somewhat expected, both in timing and size, it has a very nice New Mutants 98, 87, Inhumans 1, complete run of Transformers, almost full run of GI Joe, and plenty of other desirable pieces. This didn't take that long start to finish, maybe an hour, and off customer # 2 went. That consignment will be in the "ZZ" boxes, look for it next week.
About that time 3.) showed up. This was a total surprise. In his defense, he did call yesterday, but a lot of people call, not that many actually show up. And it's not often that I'm surprised by the quantity of a collection, in sheer mass that is, but on the phone it sounded like this guy had maybe 2-3 long boxes. NOPE... he had 15. Tons of great stuff in there. A literally COMPLETE run of Conan ( and the # 1 is SO nice), a huge Batman run, and 1,000 plus other goodies. This one completely clogged up the old office though, as I still hadn't totally finished sorting collection # 1 out of there, then # 2 showed up, now # 3 has more books than 1 & 2 combined. # 3 should be up in a week or so, look out for box code "CB" on that one.
Which brings us to 4.) this guy showed up early and had exactly as much stuff as I thought he would, which made things very difficult because I wasn't planning to have to shoe horn in 15 more boxes of stuff on top of the 25+ that had already made their way into my sardine can of an office.
To make # 4 that much more interesting. About 10 minutes before he got there, my wife dropped off my angelic 2 year old for me to watch so she could attend a viewing for a family friend's husband that had passed. So picture this, 150 square foot office with maybe 40 free square feet for bringing in collections, that's already filled, so I have NO free space, just a tiny path from the front door back to the warehouse.
To make bringing the boxes in more fun, you know, like an obstacle course, I have a 2 year old running around like crazy, and my office is so NOT baby proofed. She immediately went for the Bowen statues on my desk, then settled for unraveling my entire tape roll. At that point, I was just resigned to it. Then # 4 shows up. So I'm sure he thought we were quite the operation, books everywhere, baby running around, just an all around fantastic environment to drop your collection off into.
# 4 had a bunch of great stuff, or so I'm told. I honestly didn't even have the desire to look through it by the time we were done bringing it inside. I was just glad that it was in, lol. I know it has a ton of cool stuff in it, just didn't actually look at any of it today, oops. Look for that one in a week or so, box code "WT".
The best part about all of this is probably that our amazing store manager Joe left early today. When he left # 1 had already come through, but that was the smallest collection of the day. I wish I could be there tomorrow AM to see him walk into the newly dubbed "comics den" and try to get through my office into the warehouse. That's going to be priceless.
To sum it all up, we're incredibly blessed that we have been fortunate enough to connect with so many local sellers that trust us to bring their stuff to market, just next time I hope 4 of them don't all come on the same day within like 4 hours, on a day that I have to watch my baby at the store and drop my car off at the shop, lol.
But I guess that's what the busy Iphone days at Sprint were for, I guess sometimes you're prepared for something without even realizing it, and while I didn't totally feel "prepared" today, we got through it, and now we've got about 7,000 new books for you guys to pick through. So that's a win, a VERY tired win, but a win.
Until next time,
-Jeff///ACC