Turkeys

Well, it was a busy day at the Catalog Call Center. I only work four hours in the morning and today I kept track of my calls. I got 33 calls, and of those, 18 were actually orders. The others were calls that I had to transfer to Customer Service to handle, looking for product information or store information, or orders that didn't come to fruition because we've run out of the item.

[Most Call Centers keep all kinds of stats on the employees - Revenue Per Call, Close Ratio (how many calls resulted in a sale), Occupancy (has to do with the time you were on the phone vs your scheduled time to be on the phone) and more. So those calls for one stocking for only $25 or to ask a question affect our stats which ultimately affect our yearly pay increases. Isn't fair, since we can't determine who we get on the phone. That's why I focus on doing my best to help in whatever way the customer needs help with, not to try and sell them something anyway. I don't pay that much attention to my sheet of numbers that comes out weekly.]

We started to sell Christmas stockings and similar items early in October. Last year we sold out of some styles of stockings by Halloween, all by Thanksgiving. It was incredibly awful ~ many people don't start their shopping until Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), and here we were out of all of our Xmas stockings and many other items three weeks before the Day Itself!

So we asked and hoped that our buyers would order larger quantities of this year's stockings to be made ~ and they did. Still, out of the six styles of stockings, three are completely sold out now. Also sold out are our Personalized Santa Bag - we sell out of this every year, too. And some of the other gift items are gone, too. And we've HOW MANY days until Xmas?!

The other day I took an order for personalized stockings for two little boys. One was "Deuce" - turns out that he is a "Junior" but the family calls him Deuce instead. His brother is Beau - but that's not the name on his birth certificate - can't remember what his real name is.

Which reminded me of a guy who was at CalArts when I was there in the early 1980s. He was a film student by the name of Beau L'Amour. NO KIDDING - really. BEAU L'AMOUR. Turned out that he's the son of Western-genre author Louis L'Amour. I'm not going to say any more than that.

BTW, we're forcasted for some snow later today or tomorrow. We did have some flurries early this morning and it was 29 degrees. By noon it was 36 degrees.

When's the next flight to Los Angeles? It's too cold here for me.

Oh, and in answer to Doug and anyone who was wondering about how Cubis works: basically it's getting three of the same color together to make them disappear. It's three dimensional and some of the playing pieces are slanted and be used to build up, others are glowing and can be used to change the color of a block. You can play to simply get rid of a certain number of blocks or to get rid of all the ones with stars on them. There is also a game where there are "ghosts" that appear and shift around - they can really mess you up!