February 22, 2007

• Perhaps you have been feeling that your life -- composed of music, books, needlework, family, household tasks, a little gentle socializing and work -- is dull. If so, I can suggest to you how to make your life exciting.

  First, you must arrange to have your job in jeopardy. Have the company hanging by a thread, so that only a complete change of approach might save it. If at all possible, let the change require skills you conspicuously do not have.

  Then, get yourself involved with a bizarre and humorous legal problem. Witnessing a crime would do it, but you can make your own choice here. It needs to be something that requires you to go to the authorities and report it in order to avoid legal complications of your own.

  Go ahead and go to the authorities. This isn't a movie or anything, after all.

  Now, have your spouse decide that the criminals are going to come and kill the family in retaliation for your having gone to the authorities. He or she should plan to quit work and go into hiding in another state. Naturally, this should involve both the emotional distress of the abandoned family and financial stress. If possible, have the family fear starvation, repossession of the new car the spouse madly bought right before your job got so shaky, and not being able to send a kid to the college that has accepted him. There should also be a continual problem with refraining from bursting into laughter.

  You know, it hasn't struck me before that, in movies, when someone rushes around throwing a few things together prior to taking it on the lam, no one ever says, "How are we going to make the car payment if you quit your job and run off to Buenos Aires?"

  Saki wrote a story called "The Unrest Cure." I feel a bit like that.

  In theory, I have a day off today, since I will be working on Saturday. In fact, I will be trying to make the needed changes at the store website. If there are moments left over in the day, I hope to catch up a bit on the things that always fall off the screen when my life becomes too exciting: housework and exercise. There may also be sewing and knitting and possibly even reading.

  A phrase or two from today's entry at the online Lenten Study: "Open yourself to learning new ideas, attitudes, actions, habits. Pray for joy to accompany you during this Lenten season." Insofar as this applies to my work, it is excellent advice. We all agreed yesterday that one thing we need to do is get over the feeling that taking the store online is a wild and wacky idea. Actually, it is perfectly normal nowadays to have an online store. Everybody does it. What's more, we are not a small collective of neophytes selling our handknits, but a group of people who have run a successful physical store for 15 years, with a mail-order catalog for five. We have all the structures in place and probably should have been doing e-commerce for the past decade.

  Actions and habits may need changing in the course of the work transition. I worked from my home before, when my children were small. I tended to work all the time -- or, rather, all the available time given that I had small children to care for. One of the pleasant thoughts about working from home again is that I could spend a few early hours at the computer and then go to a Pilates class (scheduled during store hours) or the Prayer Shawl Ministry meeting (also during work hours) and then get back to work. However, I also know that I have already been skipping the gym to fit in a little more of the computer work before I go open the store, so I will have to watch that or I will not have a life beyond my work.

  New ideas thus far are all about computers. Of course, I have been using computers for longer than many of my readers have been alive. But I use them for specific things, and now I have to learn new ways to use them. It ought to be the case, it seems to me, that since I know about retail and I know about the internet, doing retail on the internet should not be difficult for me once I get the hang of it. Yesterday I found my way into the bowels of the store website and found this announcement: "Since indexing your site seems to be an exercise in futility..." I had to laugh. Since "indexing" is one of the words I learned over dinner last week, I don't really want to see it in there with the word "futility." Still, a week ago, I would not have understood the sentence, so I took that as progress.

  So far, I am enjoying learning about e-commerce. I have learned five things and done them diligently, and I am seeing results. I think this is probably the equivalent of learning "Hola. Como esta usted?" (can't punctuate that correctly) and saying it to everyone you see and having some of them respond with "Bien, y tu?"

  That is, I don't even know enough to know what I don't know. But I am being excited and optimistic about it anyway, and that in itself is good for the store. There has been a signal lack of excitement and optimism lately.

  However, I have some specific plans and goals for today. I intend to learn how to link things at the website (or whom to ask to do it for me, if that turns out to be the best thing to do), and to install the planned links. I have no idea whether this will take the entire day or whether I can polish it off in a couple of hours and then get on with my encyclopedia assignment.

  We'll see.

  • 7:47 am
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