It’s a Boy!

Yesterday I went with Michelle for her 14 week ultrasound, we had no hopes about finding out what the sex was, but to our amazement, we were able to find out and to our surprise we are having another boy! So we are welcoming a new baby boy to our family! Our hopes were that this baby was going to be a girl, but I guess it was meant to be that we have another boy!

Vegas

Well if you are anyone that follows me on Twitter than you know that I gathered a few local tweeps @CEEisME, @Wattyz, @TOSOL and @michelle_biggs! I can tell you it was probably one of the best trips that I have taken, however I am going to leave out what we did and the fun we had, because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas! Well unless you follow me on twitter and you saw my tweets while @CEEisME, @michelle_biggs and my self and @CEEisME’s friend tore up the Las Vegas strip!

The trip to Vegas was a nightmare though! When we arrived at Detroit our flight was on time but by the time we got parked found our correct terminal and was getting ready to check in our flight got delayed, which threw a wrench into the entire flight plan as it put us to our connecting city late missing our connecting flight and all they could offer us were tickets that may or may not get us in Vegas that day! Fortunately enough though we did get seats on a connecting flight!

When we finally arrived in Las Vegas we were easily picked up by bus and taken over to our hotel, the Encore at the Wynn, a very posh hotel! As we were checking in they could not find our reservations in the system, but they did tell me they were aware that we had online travel plans and that something must have gone wrong! In most cases like that the hotel usually upgrades you while they sort out the mess! Do you think they did for me? Nope and I can tell you that I wasn’t very happy about that, I also discovered that my player’s card was not working so all the time that I spent on the Casino floor didn’t count towards any comps!

So in all the Hotel was extremely nice but in my opinion service was horrible, and to me if I ever return to an establishment not only does the place need to be nice and clean, which the Encore was, service also needs to be top-notch and well that is where the Encore failed miserably, so although it was a five-star establishment, the Encore receives zero stars in the service aspect of the hotel and will prevent me from ever staying there again

Work stuff again

Today I found out the guy that tried to steal liquor and pulled a screw driver on me when we tried to stop him well he is out and about again stealing from our stores!

To me this is a major fail on the part of our judicial system not doing their part in getting and keeping repeat offenders off the street! This guy pulled a screw driver out for God sakes, I had no idea what this man was going to do much less capable of doing! Then I find out they just let him back out on the street to do the samething that he got arrested for again! Talk about a waste of my tax payers dollars!

I am positive that the cost of running him through the court system has got to be cheaper by just keeping him locked up! So what happens to the guy that goes to stop him and he does just a little bit more than just pull it out and whow that he has a weapon? What will it take to keep this fool locked up?

Work & Social Networking no-no’s

So I have had the experience of having a team member use social networking to call into work sick! This actually the first time the company has ever had this occur, so undoubtedly I see an amendment to company policy to ensure that future incidents do not occur. My opinion on this is that it is completely unacceptable to use any form of social media to convey an absence from work! This particular incident surrounded the use of Facebook to inform me that the team member was allegedly ill and unable to return to work for two days.

Under normal circumstances this would usually be covered as a failure to call in to work which in the company that I work for is termed a No Call No Show and a team member can be terminated over these incidents. However I am predicting that labor relations will say that an attempt to communicate the absence was made and will be covered as an improper call in procedure however future incidents of this nature will result in termination of employment.

The lesson here is that yes the world is rapidly changing and Social Networking to become an active part in this change but there are still some proper etiquette  to follow in regards to social networking! The first is keep business and personal separate especially in the realm of social networking. Secondly unless a company has deemed it acceptable to use social networking sites to convey messages of absence, tardiness or anything else that relates to the performance of your job don’t do it, even if your manager maybe connected to you through these types of sites.

Week 1 of setting up my online business

Wow last week was a whirlwind, so many things I had to do and I got accomplished. It’s hard to believe that I am going to own my own business and that its just days now from actually being off the ground. Wednesday I had to register the name at the county clerk’s office and then apply for my state resale certificate which will enable me to be able to buy from wholesale vendors. I have spent a lot of time researching vendors to supply my business and I have finally came up with a list of 3 that are most likely going to be who I select as my supplier. Once my resale certificate license is in hand I should be able to pull pricing information from them and with that information I will be able to make my best choice as to whom I will select as a supplier.

The next hurdle that I am dealing with is the fact that eBay has restricted my ability to list items and has me set at a $1,000 limit, which seems like a lot of money to deal with, and I don’t disagree, but the problem that I am facing is that I have a variety of items to list and given the variety and the number of items that need to be listed I have reached that $1,000 limit. Under normal business operations this would probably be fine, but unfortunately the business that I have choose cycles through product rather quickly and as a retailer I have to be able to get my items listed as quick as possible in order to capitalize on the best resale value. The example that I have is new releases as I seem to be dealing a lot in the realm of DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s. The faster the item gets listed, the better opportunity I have on getting the best retail value, every day after the movie has been released the resale value on eBay drops as more and more merchants introduce this product and thus cutting prices in to compete with everyone else selling in that marketplace. The ideal situation with new releases is pre-selling before the street date and then shipping on the street date. Being that I do not just sell new releases, the inventory that I have has already caused me to hit the $1,000 limit that eBay has stuck me with and unfortunately everyday that I hover over that limit, my ability to get new release to the market is restricted, thus costing me valuable business as my customers expect me to be able to sell them the item that they are looking for.

Hopefully week 2 will prove much more productive and the issue with eBay will be resolved so that my business can continue to grow, I believe that if eBay does not allow me to become unrestricted, I may have hit a dead end with this business and it may fail before it even really gets started. I am both nervous and excited at the same time and I am hoping for the best outcome.

#FollowFriday 12/18/2009

It was Friday and I said that I was going to do some follow Friday, well this Friday marked a special Friday, it was the date of our third Genesee County Tweetup so I think its appropriate to do a #FollowFriday to everyone that is attending the tweetup. These are real people that are also great people to know, some of them I have known for years such as my good friend @Cooter_G and @Bubblesgalorecw. Others are people that I have met through twitter and am very fortunate to know these individuals who I now consider friends of mine and am very happy to consider them friends and I too hope that they can say the same about me.

So with all of the mushy stuff behind me here is the list of people who did and was going to attend the 3^rd #GeneseeTU:

• @bubblesgalorecw
• @billbudgets
• @TJList
• @CEEisME
• @Wattyz
• @TOSOL
• @Cooter_G
• @Maggie_Star – who also brought my grandmother along
• @mjkep
• @DJPlaZma
• @michelle_biggs
• @niffirgelleinad
• @Soupy7
• @HappyFreaks
• @FrownieGirl – who was going to come but something came up last minute
• @AlexDeGruven – Who was also going to attend but unfortunately did not make it to the tweetup

I can say that it was an excellent tweetup and thank you very much #SportsCreekRaceway for hosting such a wonderful event with excellent food. Everyone had fun betting on the horse races and even some of us made a little extra dough on the betting! Even if we lost money it still was a heck of a lot of fun and something I would consider doing again in the future, with or without a tweetup!

Christmas Time

It is amazing how fast the year has gone by and here we are, at one of the most celebrated holiday’s in the world; Christmas Time. I love this time of year, although I working in retail I do not get to enjoy like I did before retail but none the less it is still one of my favorite holiday’s. I remember when I was a kid, I knew that right after my birthday came Christmas, as I was born on Dec 7^th so it was just a matter of weeks away. I remember as a kid though, it seemed like those few weeks, were the longest few weeks in the whole year.

Christmas when I was in kid in my house started Christmas Eve when the family would go out to dinner to a nice restaurant, something that my Mother loved to do each year. When we would come back home after dinner it would be a family movie night and then off to bed us kids would go! My parents really did not play the Santa role very well though as the presents were normally under the tree days before Christmas itself, but the stocking stuffers on the other hand were never in the stockings. On Christmas morning we would wake, I was normally the first one up and I would quickly go through and wake up my little brother and we would run downstairs to and sit, not so quietly on the couch waiting for mom and dad to get up out of bed. Sure enough it didn’t take long and I would hear my dad do his morning ritual of sitting on the pot for a half hour and my mom slowly start to get out of bed and start walking down the stairs. Of course we couldn’t start opening anything until after dad got done with his business and even when he would finish he generally liked to start getting breakfast ready before we could open any gifts.

The one thing about Christmas day though was that we were not allowed to open all of our gifts on Christmas Morning, we actually had to wait most of the day, but we were allowed to open our stocking stuffers. These were normally small gifts, but gifts we as kids enjoyed. For me they were normally hot wheel cars as I loved playing with cars and then as I got older they became small electronic gifts like CD’s and video games. Once we finished opening our stocking stuffers we had to go through and help clean up and get ready for an afternoon dinner with my Grandparents who would also bring over lots of gifts for us kids. Dinner was normally around 2pm and Nana and Pop would normally arrive to our home around 1pm.

Before our Christmas feast us kids would be allowed to open gifts from Nana and Pop, gosh I can remember tearing through those gifts and remembering all the things they would get us, it was great, we were such spoiled kids then. Even the clothing that they got us was nice but as memorable the gifts were, dinner was just as memorable. Christmas dinner was by far the best dinner of the whole year in my opinion and to this day as an adult it is still one of my favorite dinners. We always had Prime Rib, mashed potatoes, green beans, squash, Yorkshire Pudding, cranberry relish, and fresh pies. Of course after dinner mom and dad would go through and get things cleaned up and us kids were allowed to go and play with the gifts from Nana and Pop. They would normally stay and watch us kids play and have conversations with mom and dad, then like clockwork, right around 6pm they would gather up their things and head off to their home.

Then came the exciting part of the whole day….it was time to open up our Christmas presents from Mom and Dad, but not without first sitting through the traditional reading of a poem that my dad liked to read to us each year, The Tale of Sam Magee. Of course for us kids it was torture to have to sit patiently as my dad would read through the poem, of course I don’t think us kids were patient at all as I remember fidgeting through the entire poem, anxiously waiting for the last sentence to roll off my dad’s tongue and as soon as it did, we would race down the stairs and clamor around the Christmas tree and start sorting through all of the presents that were under the tree. Once everyone got their gifts, we were then allowed to start opening our gifts, and my gosh the furry of tearing through the paper and unwrapping every gift it seemed as though it only took just seconds to get through all of the wrapping paper.

As an adult, much of the tradition that my parents had remains the same in my household, but with some adjustments, rather than going out to dinner on Christmas Eve I invite my parents over for dinner with the rest of the family and the family from my wife’s side for my Dad’s traditional Christmas Day dinner, the same dinner that I loved every year. My Mom doesn’t mind as that means she gets two days of Prime Rib as my Dad still prepares that meal at his house to this day. Then come Christmas morning we allow our kids to open up all of their presents and enjoy playing with them all day long while Michelle and I relax and spend the day together watching the kids play. We tried to start the same tradition that I had as a kid, but to us it seemed stressful and to tell you the truth, I do not know how my parents did that for so many years.

#FollowFriday 12/04/2009

It’s hard to believe that we are here again on another wonderful Friday writing another awesome #FollowFriday blog. You know we hear a lot of talk about the negative implications about #FollowFriday and the amount of #FollowFriday spam that people have to filter through and the right and wrong way to complete a #FollowFriday. Most of you that know me know that I don’t really feel there is a right or wrong way to do something on twitter or even how you use twitter. That is the beautiful thing about twitter, it is whatever you want it to be! If you need it as a forum to post your opinion then it’s for you, if you like to talk a lot, or post random things, then twitter is here for you! So much of how I feel about twitter is the same way that I feel about #FollowFriday. The important thing to remember about #FollowFriday is that it is an opportunity for you to share with other tweeps people that you enjoy reading tweets from and interacting from. This is the main reason that I have started doing a blog versus just the normal #FollowFriday that you see posted on twitter. I have so much more to say about my tweeps than 140 characters allow us to tweet about. So without further ado, here is my #FollowFriday mentions:

• @StuElwell http://twitter.com/ StuElwell
• @lodden11 http://twitter.com/lodden11
• @Chattylisa69 http://twitter.com/Chattylisa69
• @Makefate http://twitter.com/Makefate
• @pippad http://twitter.com/pippad
• @peekay_writes http://twitter.com/peekay_writes
• @lynshehua_99 http://twitter.com/lyshehua_99
• @Luvschweetheart http://twitter.com/Luvschweetheart
• @TheALReza http://twitter.com/TheALReza
• @alansheppard http://twitter.com/alansheppard

These ten tweeps are a great group of tweets and I am going to let you that one of them is a family member of mine. @Luvschweetheart is my big sister and has been one of my tweeps from the very beginning! Love ya sis and can’t wait to see you again! If you are reading this and isn’t on twitter, then it’s time to go to www.twitter.com and sign up and instead of following celbs follow these 10 tweeps and don’t forget to see my past #FollowFriday blog postings for more great tweeps to follow!

#FollowFriday 11/27/09

Here we are, another week behind us and let me tell you I am glad that it is over. A little insight for this week for me can be basically summed up as the busiest week ever. As you know, which you should this past Thursday was Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays as it’s a time to not only give thanks for what we are thankful for but to spend time with family and enjoy downright awesome food! I love Turkey, dressing, mash potatoes and all the other fixings to go with along with Pumpkin and Apple Pie.

This week also marks the busiest shopping weekend of the year. In retail the day after Thanksgiving is named Black Friday as it notes the mark for retailers to come out of the red (making virtually zero profit) to entering into the black (making profit for the year). From Thursday through Saturday the only thing that one working in retail is just take care of the customer and do whatever you can to make shopping in such a busy environment as bearable as possible. People go crazy these three days, staying up all night waiting in lines in hope to snag a great deal on an item and the ones that do stay up all night in those lines are usually able to snag up one or more of these deal. As retailers we do all we can to bring people in, slashing prices so low on electronic items, toys and fashions. It is virtually amazing that as retailers we are able to offer items as such a discounted rate that we can actually turn a profit during those three days.

Given all of that, this has been what has been consuming my time and though I have not been as active on Twitter as I usually I am, I was still able to snap a few photos and share them with you and what it was that I was dealing with. So much like last week my #FollowFriday will be done much the same and that was mentioning all the tweeps that mentioned me this week in their #FollowFriday postings. I appreciate all of the love that you all show for me by sharing me with your other friends so I would like to return the favor and share you with all of my friends. So here is my #FollowFriday list for this week:

@trobertc http://twitter.com/trobertc

@alj000 http://twitter.com/alj000

@aherne148 http://twitter.com/aherne148

@Janedebond http://twitter.com/Janedebond

@cri333 http://twitter.com/cri333

@JuicyJulesRocks http://twitter.com/JuicyJulesRocks

@mjkep http://twitter.com/mjkep

@melsmic http://twitter.com/melsmic

@rallykid http://twitter.com/rallykid

@lookski http://twitter.com/lookski

Twitter would not be as fun without these tweeps and I can tell they are part of the reason that I have stuck around so long on twitter, along with all of my other tweeps. Don’t forget to take a look at the previous weeks for other great tweeps to follow as well. The links are posted below, and as always if you are reading this blog and you are not on twitter, then it is time that you become a member and follow these tweeps to start with along with the others that I have mentioned in my blog. All of my tweeps are real people who follow back and engage in conversation!

My Thanksgiving Week

What a busy week this has been, I don’t even think I really got to enjoy Thanksgiving like I like to do! Normally for me it’s all about rest and relaxation but this year it seemed to be rush, rush, rush. I suppose that is one of the downsides of working in retail, while everyone else is enjoying and doing their shopping, we in retail are running around just trying to keep up with the increased demands. I wished I could go back to the days when I was in high school when the only thing I had to worry about was getting seconds on my plate during Thanksgiving day dinner! I believe that next year I will try to take the holiday off as I have worked the last 4 of them in a row, it would certainly be nice to be home with my family and enjoying the holiday like everyone else that doesn’t work in retail.

One of the biggest things that surprised me this year was the crowds that turned out to catch the deals. Even though they say the economy is growing now, the number of jobs available has not really grown, there are still a lot of people out there that do not have jobs. I anticipated a bit of a slower holiday this year over last year especially in this state where the job market is shrinking every day. Yet, regardless of the economic data that is out there, the crowds still packed our stores with people eager to get some early Christmas shopping done and get in on some of the super deals that not just my company was offering but also all the other retailers out there that were offering.

One of the biggest things that I noticed in the Thursday, Friday and Saturday crowds was that the mood of the crowds seemed to be a little more cheerful and less angry compared to years prior. I have been in retail for over 8 years and it seems that these three days really bring out the worst in people, yet the crowds this year seemed light hearted, cheerful and actually happy to be out shopping. I can certainly say that this makes my job much easier as we are hassled less and are actually able to focus in on the important thing and that is taking care of the customer. It may have something to do with that people, even though they have money to spend, it less and they are grateful for whatever it is that they can afford to get, which proves another point that money does not make people happy! Just a thought to put out there! However this is not saying that we didn’t get our few crazy shoppers out there, I ran into a couple of different people that were less than enthused about being out shopping in the crowds and I also found some hardcore shoppers out there this year. In fact this was the first year that I literally watched someone puke in a trash can, obviously this person had no business being out, but they just couldn’t resist not getting in on the deals that retailers were offering.

So remember when you are out shopping this holiday season, keep in mind that the retail workers that you encounter are doing everything they possible can do to keep the product on the shelf and please do not take your anger and frustration out on them, we are already as stressed as it can get, and this is mainly from the fact that like every other employer out there is trying to do more with less, especially during recessions.