Tag Archives: feedback

Monday Musings

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I injected myself last night . It was a few days behind schedule because it’s easy to forget to stab yourself with a needle. It ranks below dieting and exercise as a way I’d like to spend my time. I’d rather eat salad.

It was mildly uncomfortable, but this morning I noticed that it had bled overnight. Not much, just enough to make Julia recoil in horror at my blood-flecked night attire. That’s what happens when you have injections to take and pills that stop your blood coagulating. As I’ve said before, several of the pills I take are to stop the other pills doing me any harm. It’s not a sustainable way of going on, and I promise you I never set out to do this to myself.

Add that to the fact my right leg, after being held at a moderately uncomfortable angle last night, felt like the knee had been stuffed with gravel, and it wasn’t a great morning.

Then we had emails . . .

Stamps, stamps, stamps…

An Australian wants us to send him a parcel (value about £140) listed as a present with no value on the customs form. He also wants us to send it without insurance or the need for a signature so he can keep his costs down. I sympathise, but on the other hand, there are so many things that could go wrong with that arrangement that we really can’t do it.

Another Australian gave us a lecture on parcelling up his order and keeping costs down. It’s always tempting to write and thank them, point out that we have a feedback of over 10,000 (done the hard way) so it’s possible we know about packaging, and ask if they have any helpful tips on sucking eggs as my grandmother is finding it tricky.

But I don’t. I have the good name of the shop to consider.

Yes, I know you are wondering what could be hard about sitting in a shop sending parcels. The easy way to get to 10,000 feedback is to sell mass-produced items from a wholesaler, which fit neatly into a padded envelope. Compared to laboriously listing individual items with a variety of packaging needs, that is the easy way. I packed eight parcels this morning, using four different sizes of envelope, three different postage methods and six different postage rates. It’s not as hard as some jobs I’ve done and I’ve never fallen off a ladder or given myself an electric shock whilst doing it (unlike my previous lives in farming and gardening) but it has its moments.

Magical Worlds Stamps

Sales, Surprises and Staff

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If you read yesterday’s post you may have noticed that I missed the title off. It’s not the first time I’ve done that, but it is the first time since last year – one of the advantages of my “no title” series of posts. It has a title now, though it didn’t exactly stretch my creativity.

It was a good day in the shop. We had five orders on eBay, one for 32 items I had only loaded yesterday. They were only cheap, but any sale is a good sale. It was one of those double-edged events – glad to make the sale, but slightly regretful that two hours of listing and (complicated) loading of photographs brought such a quick result. Even though it was clearly a masterful bit of listing, it seems like wasted effort when it finishes so quickly.

We then had several customers by appointment, answered phone calls and listed more items for sale. One of the customers was very knowledgeable, and told us so, at length. It’s very tempting to be sarcastic, but I’m better than that.

Then, when I finished loading the new coins, I checked for new sales and found we’d had six sales, one of which was for more than all the sales we’d had overnight. There’s always plenty of room for surprises when you have eBay.

Another surprise was a comment in our feedback, which I liked – “you should be very proud of your staff”. I’m thinking of having it made into a T Shirt.

Gold £2 Coin 1995 End of WW2 Reverse

Dove of Peace on a 1995 £2 coin – this one is gold, the ordinary ones were brass. For those of you from UK, yes they were meant for circulation but they never caught on.

A Post I didn’t mean to write

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The day dawned fair, and far too early. I wanted to turn over and have a lie in as it’s my day off and we weren’t going out but Julia had exacted  a promise from me the night before and so I had to get up and take her to breakfast before dropping her off for her first day of jury service.

I am a man of my word.

That meant I was able to get to the jewellers in time for a good two hours of moaning about the state of business before returning home to spend a couple of hours moaning about politics and sport with Number One Son. During this time he heated up last night’s beef rendang for lunch. I am eating well at the moment.

I also had an email to deal with this afternoon. My luck is really out as far as poetry editors is concerned as I just had another rejection. I thought the 3 haibun were all reasonable and had a good chance of success, but it appears I was wrong.

The rejection was accompanied by some notes, which was handy as it’s always nice (though rare) to get feedback. Sometimes it’s probably better to get feedback than it is to get accepted.

I don’t know if any of you have ever noticed this, but I often feel that once you have either posted your work, or hit the send button, it starts to deteriorate.

Even if it is accepted, the polished gem you sent never looks as good when it is printed. And when it is returned it looks even worse. I looked at what was sent back today and looked at the notes and wondered why I’d sent it. The first sentence of the first submission was just so glaringly wrong, yet two weeks ago it had seemed brilliant.

So, apart from writing better, I also have to start looking at everything with a much more critical eye.

Anyway, I had the afternoon off, so I set to work with the suggested improvements and have resubmitted them. Fingers crossed.

This wasn’t the post I meant to write, but it was what emerged on the paper as I started writing. I am not always master of my own keyboard. That, of course, means I have no suitable picture so I’m reusing the Dylan Thomas £5 coin photo. It’s a tenuous poetry connection, but it’s the best I can do. As I read the post where it originally appeared I see this is the second time I’ve used it as a random space filler.

Here’s more information about the coin if you want it -it is quite interesting.

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Dylan Thomas Alderney £5 coin