I AM BORED

And a good thing it is, too.

Sometimes events conspire to put you into an involuntary time-out that you couldn’t afford time or money-wise, but one you really needed for the sake of both mental and physical health.  I needed to be out making sales calls since early January, but the combination of stress shell-shock, back injury and bad weather all pretty much put the kibosh to that.  The stress stuff was pretty much healed up by mid-January, the back injury is still not back to 100% but not a big problem; now it’s just the weather.  The first storm shut things down for 3 – 4 days; we had another storm about a week later that sent everyone home early in the day.  Then we had another snow day yesterday which kept me from 2 appointments and we’re predicted to have another big storm on Tues/Wed next week, which will probably shut things down for 2 or 3 days.  So I guess the good news there is that instead of missing 24 days of sales calls, thanks to the weather I only missed 18.  It feels like I haven’t done anything, but over the past 3 weeks I’ve wrapped up the old business and started the new, set up our new warehousing/packing arrangement, taken care of moving the inventory and furniture and everything else out of our old office/warehouse, revised our product selection and catalog, pulled together 3 new programs we can offer our customers, and landed 2 new vendors.  My best salesperson (better than me, certainly) is back from an ordeal he went through at the end of last year & last month and starts again on Monday (weather permitting) so all the wheels are turning now.  Reading through it makes it sound like a lot has been accomplished, but it feels like things have been sooooo s-l-o-w, though maybe that’s partly due to the unchanging daily scenery now that I am working from home again.

In any case, the onset of boredom is a good thing.  The slow pace of the past 5 weeks has given me the time and space to mentally work through a lot of stressful issues one at a time to where things are now manageable.  I don’t know how other people respond to extreme stress, but with me it just kind of shuts me down – I have to practice extreme avoidance to dealing with things until I can process them one at a time.  It’s the totality of issues which swamps me.  I have to avoid all of it for a little bit to heal up, then pick away at it one mental block at a time. 

On the other hand, you wouldn’t believe the reading list I’ve torn through over the past 5 weeks.

When it’s all said and done, the whole dissolution of the old business and all the stress that went with it has had some really positive effects, the biggest of which is that I’m no longer in business with a crazy person.  Through the shutdown I managed to take care of all our customers and our vendors, in spite of the aforementioned crazy person’s numerous attempts to make it impossible to do either.  Thanks to breaking up the business, I found a more efficient and inexpensive way to handle our warehousing and packing; then of course there’s the money saved from not paying the crazy person to not work, the money saved from not having a crazy person making bad business decisions and commitments, and so on.  Even though we lost some ground going through all that, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble making it up now that we aren’t dragging around the dead weight, and we’ll finally have a chance to really make the business work.  With all we went through, we came very close to covering all expenses for the last 5 months of the old business when we had just started running with our new catalog and full-blown operations with an office and warehouse.  So there’s plenty of room there for doing much better than break even.

And in the Schadenfreude department, the crazy person who shall remain nameless and who made my life a living hell for almost 2 months through pointless legal harassment has since the first of the year been evicted from her place (they tend to do this when you don’t pay the rent) and has had another vehicle repossessed.  Apparently sitting on your ass for two months waiting for a “settlement” to which you’re not entitled and will never receive because you’ve already pissed away any profit it would have come out of is not the best financial strategy.  Then there’s the whole downside of hiring an expensive shark for an attorney and lying to him about the value of the business you’ve been pushed out of – when there’s no money coming your way, the shark turns his attention to YOU.  I don’t know how many years he will put into following her around with wage garnishments to cover his bill, but it couldn’t happen to anyone more deserving.  As for my legal bills…well, they’re no more than what I was willing to give the crazy person to just go away in the first place, had she had the sense to even listen to an offer, so I figure it’s a wash.

Sometimes things really do work out for the best.  Even though I would have gladly traded in the stress of the whole situation, there’s something deeply karmic and satisfying about watching someone who’s trying to crap on you succeed only in shitting down their own leg.