F.U.B.A.R.

"If this isn't the biggest bag-over-the-head, punch-in-the-face I ever got ... GOD DAMN IT!" - Clark Griswald

Really bad day at work today.

The most infuriating part of this whole mess was that we knew this was going to happen and we did everything we could to think ahead and attempt to circumvent this problem before it ever came up, yet we wound up getting screwed anyway. Unbelievably frustrating.

So, what happened, you ask? EMI happened. Yes, the worst record company on the planet is in the process of royally screwing up their biggest release of the year: the twin Beatles box sets, which are set to release on September 9. The ripple effects of this latest cock-up should pretty well sabotage the grand kick off to our fourth quarter, and torch what should have been our best weekend (and non-Christmas month) ever. To say we're "infuriated" is putting it nicely.

Here's the set-up: I'm not quite sure how much of this is ultimately tied into the general downsizing of the music industry apparatus over the last five years or so and how much was simple modern-day corporate thinking, but right now only two major labels, Sony and UMG, still own the means to press and distribute their own product. The remaining majors, WEA and EMI, long ago sold off their pressing plants and attendant pipeline outlets and now farm out these operations to outside companies (including Sony and UMG).

With sales levels being as depressed overall as they have been over the last few years, this new compacted production scheme runs relatively smoothly, only running into a bump here and there if an album suddenly explodes around Christmastime (Straight No Chaser) or if some unforeseen event has a drastic effect on sales (the entire Michael Jackson catalog going completely nuclear in the weeks following his death). Another cause of problems with this new system is the launch of items with bulky, complicated packaging like, say box sets.

As many of you I'm sure are aware, it's not the 1990s anymore, and CD boxed sets aren't the sales-driving juggernauts they once were. That said, once in a while you do get a long-awaited collection from a Neil Young or a Genesis (or, uh, the Beatles ... you know, the single biggest act of the entire rock era), that will create some noticeable sales ripples. With artists more involved than ever in the creation of these sets, and with label catalog departments all trying to create something with a unique design and multiple design-specific components to wow the people who still buy these things, the production of these sets requires significantly more effort (and, more importantly, time) to create than simply duping a couple hundred thousand Miley Cyrus discs and booklets.

The recent distribution history with nearly all box sets has not always been a pretty sight, and we've become used to these things almost immediately running into short supply. To ensure that we would be the only store that had any Beatles box sets in stock after everyone else had blitzed through their supply, we deliberately over-ordered, especially on the limited edition mono box (which would attract the most ardent Beatles fans who also happen to make up a sizable portion of our customer base). Thus, when the word came down a few days ago that there were production/supply issues cropping up with these sets, we didn't worry terribly much: we'd ordered enough that even if our initial order was cut (as we were pretty sure it would be), we'd still have plenty of stock to work with.

Well, we got word of our allotted amount from our supplier this afternoon and were very surprised indeed to learn that while we had ordered 70 mono box sets (by far the most of any account in our supplier's system), we would be receiving a grand total of 5. That's right: 5. I figure that amount should last us a whole two minutes from the time the box comes through our front door. Gosh, what a sales bonanza that will be.

Oh, it also turns out that our stereo box set orders will likely be slashed in half as well. Great. I guess a 50% fill beats the pants off of the 7% fill we're getting on the mono set, huh? Anyway, if this figure holds up, that would leave us with 35 pieces of the stereo set, which would then necessitate us having to buy up separate copies of all of the original albums as our strategy of sourcing the individual album sales from our planned glut of stereo box sets just flew out the window.

Looking into this disaster, it appears that some genius at EMI's sales department did his research and figured on a limited outlay of 13,000 copies for the mono set. This number was arrived at before any orders had even been placed, which is standard operating procedure for most labels as they can fine-tune their shipments upwards or downwards from target as orders come in during the solicitation period. Well, it turns out that this genius guessed a tad low: orders for the set topped off around 46,000, nearly 3.5 times the size of the intended production run. Oops.

Now, when this happens (which is hardly ever since most people in sales departments have at least a basic grasp of what the fuck they are selling), you generally have two options as a company: 1.) you delay the release of item a couple of weeks to allow for production to try and catch up to demand, or 2.) you stick with the release date and allocate shipments so that everyone gets something to sell, just not the quantities that they'd ordered. Locked into this September 9 street date since April 7 for crissakes, EMI felt they had no choice but to go with the latter option. A decision was then made to fulfill all the remaining orders before cutting the piece off once and for all. Thus, the mono set appears to still be limited ... to 46,000 units. At 270 bucks MSRP, one might figure that supply should last for a pretty good while. The stereo set, which is priced cheaper and actually has more CDs in it, will be available in perpetuity.

Of course, catching up to these remaining orders is going to take some time. Since they cannot press their own product, EMI has to stand in line along with everyone else, which means that retailers won't be seeing refreshed supplies of these sets for anywhere from 2-6 weeks after street date. In our discussions before we arrived at our order figure, I opined that these sets would get a pretty good second wind around Christmas time, but I didn't exactly figure on them being COMPLETELY GONE until then.

So, this is the way we sell things in the 21st century: set a release date months ahead of time, whip the media and the marketplace into a froth with wall-to-wall hype, and worry about whether you can actually meet said date sometime later on. Don't worry: by launch date, people will want to be the first to own your product so badly that it barely matters if you didn't make enough to go around or that there might be some mislabeled discs or perhaps a couple of packing errors during the assembly of the piece (whoops! I have an extra copy of Abbey Road instead of Yellow Submarine and my Please Please Me CD actually plays Rubber Soul instead!). This whole fiasco feels more like the launch of the Playstation 3 than something dreamt up by the music industry. Perhaps I miss the point when I wonder how this can be anything but a PR disaster, especially considering that the record industry has a vested interest in people buying their products, and this is generally helped greatly when that product is actually in stores when they say it's going to be.

Until today, we were really looking forward to these sets as there aren't many bands that create excitement amongst music people of all ages like The Beatles. Now, we're kind of dreading having to explain everything I wrote above time and time and time again. There are going to be a lot of very unhappy Beatle nerds running around on September 9 and the days afterward, and there aren't many things in customer service that are worse than dealing with unhappy nerds. Bravo, EMI.

(Twenty Years) Part 15: Raid

The once-booming market in live bootleg CDs had been in flux for some time in early 2001. In the years following the enforcement of GATT, finding workable sources for these illicit titles was like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole (for us as well as the authorities). Also, as good titles became harder to locate, the packaging standards had started to head down the tubes, both in terms of the once-ornate booklets and cover art as well as the source music, which was occasionally being sourced not from original show tapes but from compressed digital files grabbed right off of the internet.

Granted, these were bootleggers we were dealing with and not, say, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, so there wasn't an awful lot you could say when you got a dozen copies of a Metallica concert burned onto a generic CD-R with paper artwork straight out of a cheap PC printer and the songs all separated by a second or two of silence (since the manufacturers not only used mp3 files, but couldn't even be bothered to burn the stupid shows using Disc-At-Once). It's not like these things were sold on any kind of returnable or guaranteed basis, either: once you bought 'em, they were yours forever. For the first time since we'd started buying them in the late 80s, the problems of carrying bootlegs were starting to outweigh the benefits.

Around the end of 2000, we had found a new and local source for boots, and we'd get our orders from this guy quite literally in pieces: that is, CDs in one box, artwork and jewel cases in another. It wasn't a ton of fun standing there behind the counter and putting these things together for hours on end, but I guess it beat shrink-wrapping stacks of Italian vinyl albums in the silent back room of J.J. Newberry's. It was, of course, right while I was elbow-deep in illicit CD components that a handful of Mentor's finest came barging into the store, demanding to talk to the owner right now, while two belligerent RIAA agents threatened us with immediate shutdown if we didn't comply with their demands. Wheeee.

Over the next three hours, we had to stand by and watched as hundreds of CDs were seized and removed from the premises by the RIAA goons, with the men in blue providing the muscle. The detective in charge of the operation handled the bust as fairly as we could have hoped for, considering we had been caught completely red-handed. The RIAA guys, on the other hand, were a couple of arrogant little woodpeckers who demonstrated an amazing ignorance of what was a bootleg CD and what was not: there were a flashes of contentiousness as we would testily point out to them that such-and-such particular import live release was not, in fact, a bootleg.

In the days and weeks afterward, some friends of ours speculated that Deak must have had something to do with this bust as the timing was just too perfect to ignore. Sure, conspiracy theorists have spun vast, intricate webs of causality out of far less remarkable coincidences, but I'm fairly certain that one had nothing to do with the other in this instance. But talk about a shitty opening week ... in one day, seven grand in inventory that had just been purchased from the previous owner was wiped from the books and is probably still sitting in an evidence storage room somewhere. Ouch. We were also forced to play nice with the RIAA and help them shut down our local boot distributor as a trade-off for avoiding prosecution. When all was said and done a few weeks later, we were given an admonition from the Mentor PD never to traffic in these recordings again and that was that.

While losing a ton of money was not what I had in mind, I'd been secretly wondering for years when we'd finally leave bootlegs behind, end our constant worrying about excess visibility and stop having to play dumb whenever we were asked directly what these discs were and where they were coming from. Financially, this was a nasty blow for an operation just getting started: we're fairly certain that the total loss of that area of business cost us the year as 2001 was the first of only 2 down years we've experienced since we opened in our current location (the other, being last year, was more flat than down). That said, it was a secret relief for me to close out that particular chapter of our existence.

(Twenty Years) Part 14: Emancipation

It was a year and change after I became the assistant manager of the store that the day we had been waiting for all these years finally arrived: Deak had decided at last to walk away from Record Den and was negotiating the sale of the store to Greg. Typically, we found out later through other sources that selling to Greg hadn't been Deak's first choice (shocker!), but apparently no one else had been interested in buying out the location, leaving him with no choice but to work with Greg's terms. I don't even want to think about what would have happened if he had sold a store out from underneath us again, but it certainly wouldn't have been pretty.

As you might have guessed by now, Greg's nearly three decades of loyal service to the Record Den chain were richly rewarded at the end as Deak relentlessly attempted to squeeze as much dosh as possible from anything not nailed down. The negotiations, such as they were, followed a similar pattern throughout: Deak ratcheted the price of every display fixture and desk organizer on the premises as high as he dared, and then Greg would endeavor to argue him down to a suitable meeting point. There were even a few times during this process when Greg would outright refuse an offer, either trying to play hardball or from outright disinterest (this was the case when Deak was asking silly money for the internet rights to the "Record Den" name, which we wound up declining).

Interestingly, we noticed during the negotiations that Deak still seemed to place a high value on the "Record Den" name on the wholesale front, yet he had to know as well as we did that our name was Mud as far as the industry at large was concerned. In reality, the only true value the words "Record Den" had to anyone was with our customers, none of whom had any idea of the credit shenanigans our company had pulled with the majors over the previous decade. That said, it's pretty surprising that Greg was able to get us an open account with WMG (Warner Music Group), and nothing short of miraculous that he eventually finagled a way to buy direct from Universal (the biggest of the Big Four, and the Godzilla of music distribution).

While I'm sure that Greg's longstanding reputation with many sales reps and promotional execs is a lot of what greased the wheels with WMG and Universal (particularly the former), it's also fair to assume that our new company name helped put their respective credit departments at ease. The creation of "Walrus Music" as a corporation was a deliberate move to separate this new venture from the old "Record Den" in the eyes of our would-be creditors. The name was the end result of Greg and I volleying Beatle-themed ideas back and forth for a day or so in search of a cool sounding company name. I would like to note here, for the record, that I think "Walrus Music" was a bit too obvious a choice: I was trying to come up with far more obscure points of Fab reference in my ideas. That said, I have to admit that Greg probably had a point when he noted that my favorite idea might not be the most inviting-sounding business name ever ("Hello, this is Slagger's! Can I help you?"), and since he was putting up the dough to start the corporation, "Walrus Music" won the battle.

With no announcement (save for the few friends and store regulars who had been aware of the situation) or fanfare whatsoever, Record Den officially became Greg's business at the end of March, 2001 with the newly-incorporated Walrus Music taking over all operations. While we looked exactly the same on the outside, it felt wonderful walking into the store that day, knowing that we would never have to deal with Deak on a professional basis again and relishing our new found independence. Finally the masters of our own destiny, we started working out new ideas on changing things around to our liking, and wouldn't you know, the first major change to the store occurred within days of Greg's taking control ... about two, to be precise.

(Twenty Years) Part 10: The End Is The Beginning Is The End

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

Looking back from now, what happened in November 1997 wasn't exactly a surprise, but how it happened certainly was.

There had been numerous discussions over the years in the store about Greg getting out from under Deak once and for all, opening his own place and running it exactly the way he wanted. This scenario made for a nice pipe dream, and it was all one could cling to when Deak was showing up unannounced at the store and spending hours honking at us to wear slacks instead of jeans while compulsively re-arranging boxes of screeching Elmo dolls or Co-Ed Naked t-shirts or anything aside from, you know, music.

Even Greg was running out of patience dealing with the deteriorating situation: the closest he had come to leaving was during the month or so that he seriously entertained the idea of working as a buyer for a local one-stop that was being run by an old acquaintance of his. He wound up sticking around instead, but it was becoming clear that he was starting to reach his wit's end. Perhaps the most infuriating affront to Greg was our inept buyer showing up at the height of the Christmas rush a couple of years in a row and ransacking our inventory for product to redistribute to the rest of the stores, none of which were run by people able to do their own holiday-week buying anymore.

While Deak played with toys, Rome continued to burn merrily away. A veritable mobile juggling act was in progress for our district manager as Record Den locations opened and closed right and left, creating what we called "The Traveling Road Show" as it seemed like we always had a full store's inventory on the road headed somewhere from another location that Deak had closed in the dead of night without any employees aware of what was happening until the next morning. While shutting down operations and packing things up on the sly cut down on soon-to-be-canned workers ransacking the store as a parting gesture to management, this was only an incidental benefit as these commando-style closings were actually done in order to sneak out early on lease agreements. Typical.

I think it was sometime in October when we started to hear some whispers from little birdies in the know that Deak was setting up a deal to sell off parts of the dying chain in order to obtain some desperately needed cash flow, but we could never have guessed that he would, in effect, cut off the patient's head in order to save the rest of the body. Early in the afternoon of Friday, November 7, he and our district manager appeared unannounced at the store, and the looks on their faces telegraphed that bad news was coming. Greg and Deak took a walk in the mall to have their discussion, and while they were gone, the DM laid it all out for Brian (then the assistant manager) and I: we were being sold to the Record Town chain, effective in about nine days. Bam. It felt as if we'd been flattened by a train we'd never even known was approaching, like something that might happen in a Wyle E. Coyote cartoon.

The rest of that day was spent in deep discussions amongst ourselves, largely dealing in the subject matter of "well now what the fuck do we do?" Greg was in a state I'd never seen him in before: some indeterminate area equidistant between shock and fury: he'd made many offers to Deak over the years to buy out the store in the event Deak decided he wanted out of the record business, and even considering that they were never the best of friends, to have the location sold out from underneath him without any warning had taken him completely by surprise.

While my immediate knee-jerk reaction from all of this was to just walk out the door and start writing full-time (I had been freelancing for Scene on the side for a year and half by that point), I calmed down enough to entertain the idea of at least hearing out what Record Town had to offer. One thing Greg suspected was that our new masters were not going to be anything like our current regime, but that was also not necessarily a Good Thing. A major part of our success to that point in time had been dealing with imports (either legitimate and otherwise), and while we knew the boots would certainly have to go when Record Town took over, we also wondered exactly much autonomy we would be given in import buying (or any buying, for that matter).

I think it was a day later that a gray-suited regional manager/drone appeared in our store to welcome all of us to the wonderful world of Record Town and give us a little added background as to what was going on. As it happened, the purchase of our store was not much more than a chess move in the grand game Record Town was playing against Camelot Music (their nemesis on a national scale). While they initially weren't that thrilled with the size and location of our store relative to theirs, they were astounded at the sales numbers Deak had supplied them and that factor more than anything else had sealed the deal (nevermind the fact that those amazing numbers were all sourced from our 1996 sales year, before Best Buy and Circuit City had moved in across the street, and before the mall entrance nearest to us had been closed off: the combined effect of these had knocked our 1997 expectations down considerably). Their thinking, essentially, was that if a Mickey Mouse local chain could mount a serious challenge to a Camelot Superstore in a little shoe box-sized mall outlet store, then imagine what could happen with the amazing buying might and superior brainpower of Record Town behind us!

Inadvertent condescension aside, the regional manager drone didn't seem like a bad guy, but he addressed our concerns about how things would go under their ownership a little too easily (and vaguely) for our comfort. It felt like we were being told pretty much exactly what we wanted to hear, and we knew a lot of it was probably complete bullshit. This was confirmed a couple of days later when Greg sat in on a conference call with some company bigwigs, the results of said chat were enough to steer him away from staying when the switchover happened. Surprisingly, he opted instead to appeal to Deak to relocate us elsewhere in the company, if at least for the short term. Deak, maybe feeling more than a tinge of guilt (or perhaps eager to have Greg aboard in his effort to right the ship), agreed to let anyone who wanted to stay the opportunity to work at the chain's Great Northern Mall store until a long-term solution (namely a brand-new Lake County store) could be found.

I remember that I had some serious reservations about this idea at the time, and I discussed them with Greg during that last week we were open. Central to my misgivings was the feeling that we might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire by hanging around with Deak (not that working for Record Town sounded like any more charming of an idea, granted). I asked him if this might be the opportunity we'd been talking about for years to get away from this guy at long last, but Greg answered that he was just not ready to open up a new store from scratch and that Great Northern was only a short term solution, one way or the other. Reluctantly, I stayed aboard, hoping I wasn't making a terrible mistake by doing so.

Deak's next move was easy to predict: Record Town would be buying our store lock, stock and barrel, including (hopefully) any product that was in it at the time of the inventory that would be conducted before the sale was finalized. With nine days before that happened, Deak dumped nearly half the warehouse on us over that final week as box after box of deleted and inactive product arrived at our shipping door and was dutifully packed away in understock to be absorbed by our new owners (who, I am told, wound up bouncing a hell of a lot of this garbage right back at Deak. Hee hee.).

Greg was also playing a couple of shell games of his own with the imports, shipping all of the bootlegs and the cream of the legitimate product to Great Northern and directing all the outlying Record Dens to transfer their dead import stock to Mentor at once so that they would be also be absorbed into Record Town's inventory. We also shipped hundreds of the hard-to-find/specialty domestic CDs that gave our inventory its distinctive character to Great Northern as well to kick-start the process of rebuilding that store's stock and reputation.

Fridays and Saturdays were always our busiest days, but that last weekend we were open at Great Lakes Mall felt a lot more like a funeral wake than a couple of days at work. Between a notice I had slipped into the Scene's local news section about the transition, an interview Greg had done with the Lake County News-Herald about the store's closing, and word traveling around, it was a sad two days of goodbyes and well wishes from many of our core regulars.

Melancholy as they were, Friday and Saturday were a parties in the park compared to Sunday, which was a miserable slog. Jim and I worked that day (as usual), and we were joined by a Record Town manager from the Euclid Square Mall store who was slated to take over our store first thing Monday morning. The new manager set up a table at the front of the store and started immediately badgering everyone who walked by to fill out a job application. While I found this irritating on its own (particularly in the way she went after people like some kind of used car salesman), I started getting snappy when she also decided to start playing store manager a day early, bossing Jim and I around to do random tasks as the day progressed, constantly on us to lower the volume of the music and castigating me directly at one point for daring to have a cigarette in the back room during a typical afternoon lull in business with an annoyed "you're not supposed to be back here!"

By about five o clock, even the normally easygoing Jim was staring daggers at Record Town Woman's back: he was as annoyed as I that our planned send-off for the old Record Den was instead a sneak preview of the kind of obnoxious, scolding dicketry that awaited us if we'd opted to stick around instead of heading to Great Northern. Any doubts we might have harbored about jumping ship were put to rest for good that day: both of us had been there too long to have someone new march in and act like we'd been shipped in from the temp agency last week. As a little parting shot to the new regime, I selected a closing theme, Pink Floyd's "Welcome To The Machine," played at the highest volume I could get away with while the inventory team started to assemble in the store a few minutes before closing. Jim grinned: he got the point. That was all that mattered.

Greg came in as we were closing up shop and the Record Town inventory drones were getting their counting machines revved up. I was actually kinda curious to hang out for a while and watch the process, but I had to review a KMFDM concert that night, so I had to meet up with an old friend and ex co-worker after finishing up the deposit and phoning the sales to the office one last time. We stopped back after the show a few hours later, and the counting was still going on, with members of the team frequently expressing consternation and exasperation at the esoteric titles they were scanning. Just a few minutes of listening to them was giving me a headache: Greg had been there for the better part of five hours enduring their blather. He was as weary, bored, and as ready to walk away from that store as I had been earlier that evening. It felt completely wrong to end this chapter of our lives this way, but at the very least there was the promise of a new beginning (maybe in Willoughby or Painesville) sometime in the new year.

We had all decided to take a week long vacation/break before starting at Great Northern to decompress a bit before heading straight into Thanksgiving Week and the subsequent holiday season on the other side of Cleveland. A few days into that break, my curiosity got the best of me, and I headed to the mall and walked into what had only a few days ago been Record Den. The change was already dramatic: the imports had been rounded up, marked down, and unceremoniously dumped into a bin near the front of the store, the old "RECORD DEN IMPORT" tags obscured behind much larger white bar-coded sale stickers. The back window, which we had used to keep an eye on things while eating lunch or having a smoke in the back room was completely obscured by a wall of portable tape cassette racks (since no one was ever to be in the back room anyway, there was no need for that window). Best of all, there was some god awful crossover R&B crap being played on the stereo that was so overwhelming the damaged speakers we'd left behind for the new tenants (I had helped blow those cones out a year or so before doing a particularly loud airing of disc 2 of Pink Floyd's P.U.L.S.E.) that it kinda made the whole enterprise feel pathetic and fake. I didn't feel any sorrow or anger, just an amused kind of contempt: the twenty-some-odd years of work put into that store's inventory and image had been undone virtually overnight, and walking into that Record Town that evening felt no different at all from entering NRM or Camelot.

We were told a few months later that the manager of that store had taken a lot of abuse over that Christmas season from customers who didn't know what had happened: many of them voicing displeasure with the new store, and nearly all of them asking where the hell the old stock and the old crew had gone. For a short time, I actually felt kind of bad for her as I wondered how I'd handle continually being subjected to that kind of grilling. Then I'd remember how that final Sunday at the old Record Den went and feel my face stretching into a mean-spirited, pitiless grin. Welcome to the machine, indeed.


P.S.: During our spring 1997 inventory, I returned from a lunch break spent in the food court and was told by our rascally District Manager that my mother had called, wanted me to call her back ASAP, and that she left the number she could be reached at. The DM had written the number down and left it by the phone in the back room. I gave him an "ok, thanks," headed back to the phone, dialed the number, and was immensely surprised when a throaty, breathless voice immediately started spelling out a number of sexual acts she wanted to perform on me right then and there. A free phone porn line!! Kick ass!!!

Of course, this little stunt was then perpetrated numerous times over the following weeks on other employees and store regulars when applicable. Towards the end of that awful final Sunday at the Den, in a fit of malicious pique, I wrote that same phone number down on a slip of paper in black magic marker and added the words MALL SECURITY on top of it. After a moment's hesitation, I taped it up on the wall at eye-level next to the phone line conduit as you see in the picture above. God, do I wish I could have been there to see their faces the first time they had a shoplifter. Ha haaa.

(Record Den pictures taken by Dave M.)

(Twenty Years) Part 9: The Downward Spiral

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

OK, I realize that I left things off on a bit of a cliffhanger note in my last "Twenty Years" installment, but I figured this might be a pretty good time to discuss the long, slow, agonizing disintegration of the Record Den chain and keep you all in suspense as to What Happened Next for a little while longer. Mua ha haaaaa.

From the time of its incorporation circa 1970 until the middle of the 1980s, the success of the Record Den more or less mirrored that of the music business as a whole. While the purse strings were ultimately controlled by the company offices in downtown Cleveland, the individual stores were managed by crews of enthusiastic, knowledgeable personnel who were passionate about music and knew how to attract others of their stripe. A sizable percentage of the managers of these stores had been hired or trained by Greg at the old Great Lakes Mall location, and it was largely this group (or "cult of personality" as the main office might have viewed them) that had been the most directly responsible for the stature Record Den once attained around the Cleveland area.

By 1985, with the industry emerging confidently from the post-disco crash and riding the building wave of the CD/MTV era, the chain had been expanding beyond metro-Cleveland and into outlying areas of Ohio (Dayton, Bowling Green, Niles) and neighboring states (Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan). It was also around this time that the owner of the company (we'll refer to him from now on as "Deak") dropped the news to everyone that he intended to purchase a warehouse space on the east side of Cleveland and move to centralize buying operations through the main office.

The stated intent of this change in the way the chain did business was to save money, mostly by combining all of the little shipments of product moving in dribs and drabs from the distributors to each individual store into "box lot" amounts sent straight to the warehouse loading docks in order to the incur the volume discounts offered by labels to accounts who buy things by the box instead of by the handful. Problem is, the costs of distributing the product from the warehouse to all of the outlying stores (whether by company driver or UPS) tended to eradicate whatever meager amount that was saved by buying centrally. That's before we even consider the greatly-increased costs of renting the warehouse space, hiring and maintaining a staff to pull, shelve, ship and receive orders, and paying a full-time product buyer (a task once handled individually by all of the managers for no additional cost). With all of these new costs factored in the equation, the sum is, at best, a break-even proposition for a chain of maybe a dozen stores, which is exactly what Record Den was at the time.

A stab in the general direction of thrift may have been Deak's stated intention, but there was almost certainly a matter of pride behind his new warehouse as well. While he had greatly benefited from jumping into the music business at exactly the right time and letting the people who knew what they were doing guide the direction of the company for 15 years, Deak yearned to play on the same level (and thus be awarded the same respect) as locally-based major leaguers Camelot and The Record Exchange. This new warehouse was to be our notice to the industry that we intended to swim with the big fish in the little pool, and the line to start puckering up and kissing our ass starts riiiight over here, thankyouverymuch.

From the day Deak informed him of his idea, Greg was against the plan and tried to get across to Deak the simple concept "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But Deak's biggest flaw (and believe me, he has a few) was that he was a proud man who didn't take criticism for his own ideas very well, especially from people who worked for him. In the end, being the founder and owner of the company, it was Deak's call to make and he wasn't about to be talked out of his pipe dream but something so mundane and boring as realistic expectations. So it was that the warehouse was soon opened for business, and that decision was the start of the long downward spiral into which Record Den fell over the next decade.

The next step taken by Deak (referred to in an earlier post in the series), was the computerization of the company's inventory on a store-by-store basis. As each store was brought online, a buying program Deak had commissioned was implemented to automate the business of (re)stocking inventory. I'm not sure when this buying program was originally written or for what kind of music, but it was often set almost completely at odds with the way any sane record store would buy their product, particularly in the way it multiplied ordered copies based on sales. Let's say a new Rush album was being released this week and we ordered 100 copies right off the bat, knowing that Rush fans show up early and in force to obtain their long-awaited new album. Once that wave has hit, the game is up, and you can sell 75 copies of that new album in a week and then maybe 25 over the next year. Unfortunately, the buying program used by the warehouse didn't think that way, and unless you could short-circuit the process, you'd sell 75 copies of that Rush album in a week and then get shipped about 100 more the following Monday. With experienced managers, this program tic would be a minor irritation, but with the crop of inexperienced managers hired over the next few years following the transition, it often resulted in stores being choked with dozens of copies of hit albums they didn't need in the first place.

This buying problem gets further compounded when you then factor in returns: the major labels cut off unlimited product returns after they were nearly snowed under during the post-disco crash, and one-stops generally function on a "you can return 1 piece for every 10 you buy" rule, so if Record Den was buying too much product to return quickly, we had to kinda "swish it around" the system for a while. Attempts at controlling buying costs a few years later resulted in comical amounts of dead inventory being shunted around from new store to new store in order to fill these locations up with anything that was handy in the hopes that some of that nonreturnable merchandise would sell off before it was boxed up and sent abroad once again.

Things were shaky enough with one buyer (an expatriate from NRM) and an outmoded restocking system, but the addition of a full-time indie buyer in 1994 might have been Deak's worst idea during my tenure with the company. I believe the reasoning here was that our main buyer was too overwhelmed dealing with the major labels to divert attention to all of the small fry doing business underneath the radar, and with these labels suddenly a hot item in the wake of breakthrough independent albums by The Offspring, Rancid, Morphine, and Liz Phair, (not to mention sundry pre-Pearl Jam/early Nirvana projects), it was decided someone should be delegated to man the pump in that area alone.

To virtually no-one's surprise, the woman Deak selected for this task was in way over her head and had absolutely no idea what in the hell she was doing, and within months we were becoming bogged down in no-name garage-rock, techno, low-fi pop and punk records that did little but collect dust. Six months to a year later, the stores cleared these records out from their inventory to make room for newer product and all of these unsold independently-distributed titles wound up back in the warehouse from whence they came. A year or so after the indie boom came the inevitable shake-out, and while some of the more popular minor labels quietly consolidated back-door deals with the majors, a bunch of operations simply went out of business and disappeared into the night, sticking us with skids of unsaleable (and, more importantly, nonreturnable) CDs that damn near capsized the company.

If there is one thing Greg and Deak have in common, it is a stubborn streak, and their opposing ideas as to how to run the stores often resulted in arguments where neither side would easily back down. By sheer force of will, Greg had largely managed to shield the Great Lakes Mall store from Deak's worst transgressions of taste and logic, and he had also developed over time a way of "handling" edicts from corporate that managed to both soothe Deak's ego and keep his own sanity intact. Among the initiatives we successfully ducked during those years:

* A pointless, profit-free alliance with Ticketmaster. The money for the tickets being sold went nearly entirely to Ticketmaster while we were awarded the "privilege" of selling their ducats (and a single-digit slice of the pie). As to whether our slice was ever big enough to make up for additional employees being scheduled to handle a long line of people whenever Wrestlemania was announced, you'd have to ask Deak, but I get the distinct idea it wasn't.

* Those "frequent buyer cards" that promised a "free CD" after every 20 purchases. This was a direct rip from the Camelot playbook and, funnily enough, we still get asked about reinstating the program to this day, which only underlines the fact that very few people ever figured out how these things really work. You see, any store accepting these cards could only place x amount of items on sale (say, 20 or so). With everything else basically at (or close to) full list price, chances were that you, the customer, were actually paying more for each CD you purchased on that program than you normally would if most of the stock was on sale instead (which is the way we've always preferred to run it). Ergo, by the time you were finally rewarded with your "free CD," you had, in effect, already paid for it (and then some).

* Deak had a bizarre fascination with coin-op machines, whether they dispensed gum balls, M&Ms, lottery numbers or your goddamned horoscope. We were constantly under siege to have these things installed in our store and Greg always found inventive ways to keep them out.

There were also a few battles we couldn't win, such as being forced to hire Deak's daughter to work alongside us, which at least beat having to hire his son, I suppose (we barely managed to keep him out). Worse, Deak also had some interminable hard-on for kiddie fads all throughout the 1990s, and we were constantly getting boxes of stuffed animals and other silly shit to feature at the front counter. What prompted our sudden leap into Disneyland is beyond me, but I'd wager that Deak was getting hammered by phone vendors to keep up with the whole hacky sack/Beanie Baby/Tickle-Me-Elmo/slap bracelet thing ("I just sold 100,000 to Camelot Records, you know!!"). It was bad enough that Deak was apparently a sucker for this crap, but he also fussed over the merchandising of these products to a near-obsessive degree (likely because he had been talked into purchasing hundreds of the fucking things and needed to blow them out ASAP). In an act of inspired vengeance, Greg "performed surgery" on one of Deak's insanely annoying Talking Elmo dolls, removing the original pressure-triggered voice box and replacing it with "The Final Word" from Spencer's. Thus, instead of saying "Elmo love you!" and "Let's play!," our specially modified Muppet would drop such bon mots as "You're an asshole!" "Fuck you!" and "Eat shit!"

While we waged our little battles with Deak, the decline of the chain continued inexorably onward and eventually became noticeable to those on the outside. With so much money tied up in junk and maintaining an increasingly unprofitable warehouse/office suite, costs had to be cut quickly and the easiest way to gain a few spare bucks is to restrict buying (or in our case, buying and paying). While returns were restricted, labels would still sell you as much as you were allowed to buy and then bill you for it in 30-60 days. If no payment was made after that point, you were shut off until at least some money came down the pike, and it was here that the Record Den name became infamous in wholesale as office employees would beg and plead for leniency over the phone with credit departments, staving off payments for as long as possible. During any given week in the mid 90s, we were usually on credit hold with at least one of the Big Six (as they were back then), and often more.

The biggest danger to this practice of always being on hold was missing out on new releases, and to make sure we cleared that hurdle, we would buy from one-stops (industry parlance for "middle men") to land the hot stuff until we came off hold with whatever company it was that was mad at us that particular week. Over time, as credit holds got longer in duration and spread across multiple companies, the one-stops began to shoulder a significant burden of our business and, as you can probably guess, we eventually started getting into trouble with them as well over erratic (or skipped) payments.

It's never a good sign when a chain is on hold with the majors, but when said business can't even afford to keep up with the one-stops (who are then opting to conduct further business C.O.D. rather than risk accepting a rubber check), that is the surest sign to everyone that there is blood in the water. Even Deak (who had been continually distracted by a long and messy divorce) knew things were looking pretty bad for the company, and he finally came to the realization that desperate times called for desperate measures ...

Catching Up, Part 1: The End Of 2006

Unannounced posting sabbaticals are a bitch, especially when they are unannounced to me as well as anyone else out there in Internets Land who has been wondering where the hell I've vanished off to over the last five months.

To sum up, I'll start with The Short Version: life was actually Good (and thus largely unremarkable) until the very end of last year, at which point came The Return Of Drama. Goody goody. A few weeks later, here I am banging away on the keyboard at 2 AM, posting new missives into this forum for the first time in eons. Maybe I need some drama to get the writing glands working again, eh?

Anyway, a belated Happy 2007, everyone. It's been a while, so let's do some catching up on current events, eh? We'll start way back where we left off ...

DVD-RW/EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE(S)

Even considering the amount of data CD-Rs I keep behind me, I'd been battling with data storage issues for most of 2006. By the middle of summer, my copious use of various bit-torrent sites was beginning to outpace my ability to keep up with the backing up of data. This situation is made trickier by the fact that in order to keep a decent share ratio going (and thus your account) on said bit-torrent site, you have to let your downloaded goodies sit on the hard drive for a while (say, a week) so that others can nibble data off of you until you have given back roughly what you have taken. The problem here is that when you are starting to grab a lot of full-res DVDs (4+ gigs a shot), you start to run out of space on a 60 gig internal hard drive really damn fast.

It was while leafing through electronics circulars at my parents' house one weekend that a solution appeared before my eyes in the form of a Western Digital External Hard Drive. Sarah then gave me one as a birthday present a short while later, and suddenly I had what felt like a limitless ocean of 250 gigabytes in storage at my fingertips. Ahhh, much better.

Of course, time and circumstance rapidly changes that perception: I clearly remember a 5 gig hard drive on my computer at the end of 1998 felt like a hell of a lot of space, too. In order to keep things relatively open on this new external HD, I finally upgraded from a CD-RW to a DVD-RW drive, and promptly started planning on eventually shrinking down my collection of 700 burned data CD-Rs to about 100 or so DVD-RWs (which would also require a couple of additional external hard drives to amass the data before re-archiving and oh Christ what a colossal headache this is going to be ...).

NEW COMPUTER

For about a month and change, this new setup your read about above was fine and dandy (especially when combined with my new flat screen monitor ... I now hate CRTs and wonder why I waited so damn long to upgrade), but a few issues with the new DVD player started to bother me in short order. Firstly, the thing never seemed to play things back in suitable fashion, with audio and video jitters plaguing the experience right from the start. It was also very difficult to burn DVDs without errors while working on something else at the same time, and the amount of memory left on my computer while this rigorous task was going for an hour and change finally started me thinking seriously about a new computer.

It had been about 4-5 years (?) since my last upgrade and aside from the DVD issues, it was becoming clearer over the course of the last couple of years that it was time to play some catch-up ball. Making this decision a bit easier was that I was a bit flush with cash at the time (this was about a month in the wake of settling up my medical bills at the time), so I felt that a snazzy new gadget would be a nice way to celebrate Life being Good again.

It was on the last Monday in September that I made the trek down Route 91 to the MicroCenter location in Mayfield Heights on the advice of Dave M., a longtime friend, ex co-worker, and local computer guru (he built the first two PCs I ever called my own). If you've never been to one of these stores, I certainly recommend stopping by, though you might want to leave your credit cards at home as a preventative measure: it's hard for me to imagine a more drool-inducing toy store for grownups.

Walking into MicroCenter that night was kind of like what walking into Toys R Us was like when I was a kid. Temptation was everywhere and it never looked so good. But, I was on a mission, and I had a couple of predetermined machines to check out and compare and ultimately make a decision on. After a half hour of thinking and looking each choice over carefully, I opted for the guy you see above and to the right: a PowerSpec 6650: Pentium 4 HT processor, 1 GB of memory, 200 GB internal hard drive, and a dual layer DVD-R/RW drive (which immediately relegated my recently purchased Sony to storage).

A couple of days followed in which everything of vital importance on my old PC was copied over to the external HD for installation into the PowerSpec, and it took two full installs to work out the tics/"bugs" in the new system and get used to the way this thing worked in comparison to the old PC (whose dessicated husk was unceremoniously junked a week or so later). Since then, save for the usual perplexing behavioral quirks that PCs develop when running various programs in tandem from a dozen different designers and companies, it's been smooth sailing.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Brian has been onto me for about two years to get with the program and watch Sci-Fi Network's Battlestar Galactica show, and I had been fiercely resistant to the idea, largely out of the considerable sentiment I have for the original 1979 ABC TV series. I won't lie and say I was never interested: when the idea was first announced, I wondered if this was the long-talked-about return of the show initiated by original series lead Richard Hatch back in the mid 1990s. When I found out instead that the Sci-Fi Network's new series had nothing to do with Hatch's continuation of the original series and was instead a completely "reloaded" take on the concept, I was pretty taken aback. Things weren't helped when I learned of the switching of my favorite character on the old series (Lt. Starbuck) from a man to a woman role and that the new Cylons looked like they walked off the cover of last month's Cosmopolitan, I lost interest in a hurry and let the show pass me by.

Brian kept up the attack on me to just give the show a chance anyway, and it wasn't until a copy of Season One landed in the used bin at work that I decided to do just that. I finally got around to watching it around the middle of last month for the first time and was immediately drawn into the show, to my considerable surprise. (I might even say that I was blown off my feet, except that I was sitting in this very chair watching all of it, heh heh)

Christmas intervened with my introduction, and I am still midway through Season One as of this writing. I'm feeling the massive temptation to start it over again and have Sarah watch the miniseries premiere at least and see if she wants to continue onwards, though she has her hands full staying caught up with House, Rome and Good Eats (hosted by Beaker's loquacious offspring Alton Brown). So, with or without accompaniment, I will likely re-view the first half of Season 1, and then move onwards (I have all of season 2 awaiting me on DVD and what has been broadcast of season 3 so far sitting on an external hard drive). More discussion to come later.

Q4

Considering this was quite possibly the lamest release slate in the music industry in the last two
decades (during this Christmas season, it seemed like every "hot" item was a repackage or re-imagining of something previously available), we managed to nail our numbers at the store and finished off 2006 with a flourish: the best December in our current location to date, not to mention 2 or 3 new best one-day sales totals, best yearly total, et cetera. Good times.

MORE FUN WITH INSPECTOR SCENE

If there is one thing I have come to dread with the onset of fall, it's our annual dealings with the City Of Willowick and their insanely exacting Buildings Code. Unlike last year's tag-team blitzkreig inspection that was over in about 1 minute, this year's was a much more leisurely poking around by a lone Inspector Scene that wound up injecting the first tiny amount of drama back into my existence (if you count nearly a dozen minor building "issues" to be dealt with as "drama," anyway).

In a fit of pique, we had delayed dealing with any of these "issues" until the last couple of weeks (i.e., when he'd finally had enough of waiting around and called the landlord to ask what the hell was taking so long). The landlord came by Monday evening and we managed to get the entire list taken care of, though apparently not to Inspector Scene's satisfaction: the reinspection this past Thursday left a couple of "issues" still unresolved: one I can probably fix with a single half-twist of a freakin' wrench, the other with a visit from an electrician and some new bathroom tile.

CHRISTMAS

Judging from the media coverage of Christmas at the retail level this past season, I'm pretty sure that I was not the only person who wasn't in the mood for it this year.

Mostly thanks to the incredibly and unseasonably warm weather which parked over Northeast Ohio around early December (and lasted until about two weeks ago), it just didn't ever feel like Christmas this year. As a result I didn't even start my shopping in earnest until the middle of the month as far as online goes, and on the 19th as far as actually walking-into-stores was concerned.

Making matters even weirder was that this was by some stretch the easiest Chistmas season I have ever worked. In effect, the entire pre-Christmas surge as we used to know it was compressed into about 3, maybe 4 days before the holiday (a couple of Saturdays early on, and then the last Friday and Saturday before the holiday itself). The rest of the time (including Christmas Eve), it felt almost like any other month of work in a business sense, though what made the difference is that everyone in the store was actually buying something instead of poking around and leaving empty-handed.

With this weird non-frenzy that characterized most of December at work combined with my late start shopping, I remember quite clearly feeling like this Christmas had just flown on by while I wasn't looking. I'm not saying this was a crappy Christmas by any stretch, because it wasn't ... but it certainly wasn't my ideal kind of holiday season, you know?

All of the above also meant that I could barely be arsed to put up lights this year, yet alone wage my dreaded annual battle for Christmas Tree supremacy with Moe. I think it was on December 20 that I finally gave in and set up the tree, while picking up a couple of new fiber-optic light fixtures (on clearance sale, too ... sometimes it's good to wait 'til the last second, eh?) for Sarah to put in the front window in lieu of standing the tree in front of it as has been our custom in year's past.

The reason for these new fixtures was strategic: I had a plan to keep Moe from getting into the damned tree this year, and for the first time since he joined this household, I can claim total victory in this department. Instead of filling the bay window with holiday cheer, the tree was placed in the corner of the living room and the entire underside was blocked off with a couple of overlapping Scat Mats. The curtains next to the tree were then pinned to the wall to block off any access from the window ledge, and what do you know: these two moves actually kept Moe out of the tree for the entirety of the season! Yeee-ha! Victory at last!

Due to the work schedules of the second-tier store staff (and the inexorable bouncing of the holiday into regular week days), Christmas was not the same two-day holiday I'd enjoyed in 2005 and 2006, but a sole island of relaxation in a long and busy work schedule. Ah well, those were nice while they lasted. This was also a very green yule, right smack in the middle of what felt like was going to be a green winter. Aside from the incredibly glum outdoor setting, it was still a very relaxing holiday, which saw me carting home some new pairs of my favorite wool socks ever, some gift cards, new books and DVDs, and a couple of supposedly-reversible fleece crewneck sweaters from justsweatshirts.com (which are remarkably warm, whether the tags come off or not).

I clearly remember one point during that afternoon sitting in my parents' kitchen, doing some residual Amazon.com shopping on my mom's laptop while the rest of the house napped, exhausted from previous late nights and today's early morning. I was filling in some blanks, basically, cleaning up the wish list a bit and picking up a few items on sale and a few others that had been on my list for a couple of years that I'd decided to move on before they vanished. It was a very pleasant time: quiet and thoughtful and now tinged with a bit of regret as this kind of carefree indulgence is something I currently wish I hadn't done (though the amount I spent wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end, anyway). We'll tackle why in my next post ...


NP Various Artists The Complete Stax/Volt Singles, Volume 1

Autumn Is Upon Us

Well, it's October again. Time for an indian summer (I think we're getting one starting yesterday as a matter of fact), and steadily, stealthily cooling evenings that drag you into winter without your realizing what is going on. Then, next thing you know, it's November first and freaking cold out and you realize that you'd better busy yourself winterizing the car and maybe start planning Christmas shopping expenses before too long. Damn it.

O.K., I jest a bit: I actually like October a lot...it's just too bad that November has to follow, you know?

As you might have guessed from all the pics here, I'm a big fan of October colors: it's the prettiest month of the year as long as the weather keeps from getting all gray, wet and blustery. October makes me think of caramel apples and funnel cakes and rickety carnival rides at the It's Better In Mentor fair (which usually happens in September, but was always the true benchmark of the beginning of autumn for me as a teenager) and also of standing around small fires to keep warm on cool, damp nights. Most of all, October always brings up fond memories of the old cider mill my family and I used to frequent every year around this time when we were living in Southfield, getting thick apple cider and hot cinnamon-tasting donuts that were absolutely delicious and always worth the trip (now is when I start thinking about jumping in the car and making the 3.5 hour trip to the northern suburbs of Detroit to get some more, heh heh).

October also makes me think of baseball and playoffs and the World Series, but this year finds me once again in the position of having no teams to root for, and only teams to root against, thanks to the Indians falling apart at exactly the wrong goddamn time of the season. Ah well, at least with this team, saying the words "maybe next year" doesn't have that hollow ring of "yeah, right" to it.


Sarah and I have now been in the condo for over a year now: that particular anniversary came and went unheralded at the end of last August. After a rather blistering summer, the weather has been absolutely perfect over the last few weeks, which means we have not been running the AC much at all, and that makes me a very happy camper.

While we're on the money subject, I am finally seeing the end of the tunnel in getting myself out from underneath the crushing load of my car's repair bills. By the end of this month, I should be able to clear Bill Week with a decent positive balance ... maybe even enough to take care of the two other problems that have sprung up since that godawful final week of July: an apparent coolant leak of undetermined severity and the similarly undetermined state of my rear brake system. Yay.

In better news, my work schedule has recently taken a delicious turn for the better. Brian's job working for that electrician guy apparently was an utter wash from Day One, and he was recently laid off. This doesn't come as a huge surprise as things he's said offhandedly over the last couple of months seemed to indicate that all was not quite working out as planned. What makes this news notable is that he now needs more hours to work and, as a result, I now have two day weekends (Sunday & Monday) for the time being. Weeeeoo!

I could get used to this real quick...


In other store news, things are moseying along alright in a business sense, though by "moseying" I mean we've just finished up an utterly flat September (missed the target figure by 93 stinkin' dollars, damn it). Our pace for the year is still comfortably ahead of target, and thus our magic number of half a mil is still within our sights, though it might involve an extra push at some point to achieve. Last year it was the week after Christmas that saved our asses, thanks to all the godawful snow days beforehand ... here's hoping we don't get pushed up against the wall the same way this year.

Of course, November will also bring about The Return Of Inspector Scene and a part of me is just breathless with ancticpation as to how this year's inspection sweep will pan out. I have my suspicions that the assertions I've heard to the effect of "don't worry, if he checked something last year, he won't check it again this year" may not hold a lot of water since nearly all of the work we did to the doors in this condo to make them close correctly has come rather undone over the last six months or so thanks to the gradual, imperceptible sinking of this place into landfill. Thus, a part of me thinks that we will certainly hear about the doors, and yet another part of me answers that with: "yeah, so what? What the hell can I do about it now?" Needless to say, you will certainly be reading updates on this should it come into play.


NP Depeche Mode Playing The Angel

From Contentedness To Heartburn (or: The Return Of Inspector Scene)

Damn, has it really been over a week since I've actually written anything here? Well, let's get to it...

We'll start on a pleasant note: Christmas Day 2004 went just about as good as Christmas Eve did, with Sarah and I returning home from the 'rents late that night well-fed and loaded down with new clothes (including a new trenchcoat - my first in a decade, yaaay) DVDs, books, socks and even a giant ol' frosty mug. Even better yet, having the dreaded Day After Christmas off as well was like the cherry on the proverbial sundae for me. One of the biggest problems I've always had with the Christmas season is that a one-day layoff from retail insanity is never really enough for me to get my head together, relax, and return to the fray recharged and ready to deal with people again. The way this works traditionally is that you spend the week before Christmas getting busier and busier, building up the intensity to a fever pitch ... and then comes one precious day of relative peace and quiet before jumping right back into the frying pan, as busy as you were before (if not moreso). For this reason, I've been jokingly calling upon our nation's leaders for a two-day Christmas holiday for a couple of years now, and to get one this year from Greg was a very unexpected treat.

Following that incredible weekend off, it was pretty much back to work as usual. Post-holiday sales were humming along at a brisk clip that week ... so brisk, in fact, that we have since been able to come out of our snowstorm-induced pre-Christmas tailspin and exceed our December target. Rawkin'. Adding to this ever-growing mountain of happy news, my co-worker Brian called up and asked for some extra hours of work that week (he is presently unemployed save for Sundays at the store), and I was more than happy to set him up.

With another holiday weekend approaching that already had me guaranteed off for two days in a row, I was damn near ecstatic to grab a couple of additonal days off as well. Suddenly, I was on a mini-vacation -- four full days in a row off (including a very relaxing New Year's Eve spent with our dear friend Kris out in the sticks). Amazing! Life couldn't have been any better ... save for The Return Of Inspector Scene.

Yes, our long-awaited re-inspection took place early last week just before I'd set up my little New Year's break, and it did not go as well as we'd hoped for.

Nearly all of our November "violations" to Willowick's apparently-hyper-tightassed city code had been taken care of in the month and change since our first encounter with The Man. Going into the re-inspection, three minor issues remained unresolved, the first of which was of our own making. Being new to upkeep and refurbishing of dwellings, I didn't consider that showering in a bathtub that had been re-caulked just the night before might not be the greatest idea ever. Oops. By the time Inspector Scene took a gander at the tub, a few sections of the caulk had managed to come undone from the excess moisture. Yes, this is very easily repaired, but damn ... stupid mistake.

The second problem - the half-bathroom ceiling fan being too loud (there is actually a fucking city code dealing with this?!) - actually turned out not to be a problem at all. In our lone victory against the City Of Willowick this time around, Inspector Sean switched our cleaned-out-but-still-rather-loud bathroom fan on and off ... but he did it in a small enough timeframe that it didn't have time to rev up to it's full un-muffled muscle car roar. Woohoo! Sherry Bobbins would have been proud.

The third problem, however, was where the fun really started. Despite a whole lot of backbreaking work planing the shit out of the half-bathroom door, the best I could do was get it to fit into its off-kilter frame, but the damned thing simply would not latch. The night before the inspection, as I was desperately trying to make the door work, I noticed for the first time that I wasn't so much pushing the door into the frame as I was moving the frame itself (and the wall behind it) the tiniest bit to allow the door to close. Apparently, the wall at that point in the condo had separated just enough from the floor to allow this to happen, and when Inspector Scene realized the same thing I did during the re-inspection, he not only complained that the door closing-but-not-latching wasn't good enough, but that the wall would have to be fixed as well. Suddenly, three problems had become four ... and it wasn't over yet.

Weeks before, Sarah had done some work to the catch on the back door to the condominium and had succeeded in getting it to close correctly as long as you gave it a bit of an extra push while doing so (the same way we get the front door deadbolt to work). Well, that "as long as you give it a bit of an extra push" qualifier was not good enough for Inspector Scene, who then squawked importantly that according to the all powerful Willowick City Code, this door must be able to close with any effort at all. Wonderful. For the first time, I angrily started to wonder if this pedantic little prick was making this shit up as he went along.

To say the least, my landlord was less than pleased at this turn of events, but hardly shocked. From what I understand, the annual city inspections had been going fine for years until this annoying little turdfly landed in the ointment. It's one thing to flag problems that are structural or safety-oriented, in fact I welcome such alerts to important things that need attention, and despite my bitching, I honestly don't like the idea of violating anyone's city codes. However, when I'm getting constantly being zinged for idiotic, minor shit that somehow violates what must be the most intrusive building codes in the state, I start to get as snarky as my landlord was that afternoon.

What really makes these wall/doorframe issues infuriating is that any repairs we would make to correct the code violations would be useless (and probably a hindrance) once the building is raised the inch or so it has sunk into it's concrete foundation over the years. Rightfully, my landlord asked how was he expected to prop up a wall when the Condominium Association had no plans to fix the building itself? After a tense bordering-on-combative phone conversation between the two of them in which my landlord found some wonderfully subtle (and non subtle) ways to tweak Inspector Scene here and there, plans were set in motion to take care of the major new problem of stabilizing the downstairs wall and seeing what could be done with the doors afterward.

On New Year's Day, with a bit of ingenuity (and some small wooden shims hammered stealthily into place), the landlord's brother managed to stabilize the wall and allow the door to close unimpeded without having to rip the baseboards apart and nail a bunch of new boards into the existing stud framework (this was the suggested method with which we were to accomplish this repair). A subsequent bit of chipping and sanding away at the doorframe (along with cheating the doorstop back a half-inch or so) allowed us to move the door catch just a bit higher up and then the half-bathroom door closed with a *click* for the first time in God knows how long.

Oh man, I need to savor this.

THE HALF BATHROOM DOOR FINALLY CLOSES AND LATCHES. HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT.

Goat, that felt good.

Anyway, the back door to the condo was done a few minutes later: some small adjustments made to the sweep attachment on the bottom freed it up just enough to make it close and latch with hopefully enough ease to please Inspector Scene and the goddamned City Of Willowick.

And so here is where we stand at this moment in time: shy of re-caulking the bathroom tub lining (which we are going to do the evening before the next and ostensibly final re-inspection), our mandated repairs are now complete. Assuming all goes well, Sarah and I will finally be off the hook at last ... at least until this coming November.

Winter Wonderland

Well, it's not quite that wonderlandish around here yet, but according to the fine folks at Weatherunderground, our second blast of true Northeast Ohio winter weather is on the way tonight, tomorrow and Monday. As I write this, it's been fitfully drizzling rain for a few of hours in temperatures that feel a bit too mild for the kind of snow we're slated to be getting...so I guess I'm in for a hell of a surprise when I open the curtains Sunday morning.

Now, there is some good news to the forthcoming crappy driving conditions and evil wind chill factors -- according to the current long-range forecast, we're in for an early and lasting white Christmas (not one of those last-second midnight-on-Christmas-Eve arrivals like we've had the past two years), which raises my currently drained spirits quite a bit. Hopefully, this will also finally be the kick in the ass that drives people into the store at last (we seem to have derailed in our early seasonal momentum the last five days or so) and gets us the rawkin' year-end figure we've been busting our asses all year for.

With the weather going bone-chillingly horrible tomorrow, I'm looking forward to an at-least-partially relaxing day off punctuated with some more mandatory home refurbishments (which I am getting as sick of writing about as you must be reading about them). This week's work will consist of planing down the door to the downstairs bathroom so that it actually fits into it's bent frame and latches correctly, followed by the installing of new screens into the computer room windows. I'm not looking very forward to either of these tasks right now, since I am probably dangerous with running power tools in my hand when it comes to door-planing, and I haven't the slightest goddamned idea how these new screens are going to fit into the window frames when I had a hell of a time getting the old and busted up frames out last week.

I should mention that in our ongoing quest to make Inspector Scene happy with our condo, a tip of the hat is very much due to Sarah, who has really been outdoing herself on the home improvement/fix-it tip. Thanks to her work over the last week during an impromptu work vacation, the front door is now insulated and doesn't leak heat to the outside (while letting in invisible jets of cold air), the back door now latches when closed, the crack in the wall above the staircase is nearly entirely invisible behind layers of fill-in goop, and the cracked kitchen tiles around the outlet are repaired and looking dandy.

While we're talking home improvement, it's been a while since the last time we last talked holiday decorations. After an iffy start, Moe appears to have adapted pretty well to having a string of brilliant green lights all the way around the bay window. He did so well with them, in fact, that I finally decided to put up a Christmas tree. Going one step further, said tree is a brand new pre-lit model. My initial financial second-thoughts to this entire idea were put to rest in short order last weekend when we found some very nice models at the local K-Mart for 25% off, thus putting them well into my financial range (which is currently being stretched by the recent start of my Christmas shopping).



Not bad, eh?

Round Three of Moe vs. The Christmas Decorations had only just begun when our little boy came out of the corner swinging: we weren't even finished getting all of the pieces of our new tree out of the box before Moe had decided to take a few exploratory munches on the wires and branches. Thus, out came the water bottles and the Bitter Apple and the battle was joined. With the bottom of the tree now unfit for feline palates, the cats seemed to find it a cool new hangout instead of a 7 foot tall snack bar. Sarah and I thus ultimately claimed victory. People 3, Cats 0.



As it turns out, there was also to be a Round Four. Satisfied after a couple of days that Moe wasn't going to electrocute himself chewing on any of the lighting cords, Sarah decided to put up a few ornaments up on Wednesday. Bad idea. Apparently, Moe was up on two legs in no time batting away at the lowest ornaments in his reach. Not entirely surprised by this, Sarah moved the ornaments farther on up the tree, figuring that would solve the problem, but it only succeeded in getting Moe's diabolical little mind working on a solution. Apparently, Moe thought of one: when she returned home from a shopping trip that afternoon, Sarah found four ornaments scattered about the living room and into the kitchen. I personally have no idea how in the hell Moe managed this stunt (did Ghidorah suddenly turn mischeivous and give him an alley oop or something?), but after this episode and a situation later that night where Moe attempted to reach another shiny bauble and settled for jumping directly into the structure of the tree itself (much to my dismay), the ornaments came off and were packed away. People 3, Cats 1.

A parting thought before I wind down and head to bed: I'll give this much to dear ol' Martha Stewart, while I find her at best condescending and at worst outright fucking annoying when I see her foofy little show on T.V., her company sure knows how to put together a strong fake Christmas tree -- Moe's little escape gambit the other day didn't even budge it an inch, which was surprising to me considering how little I paid for the thing. Yay.

Life Update

Well, it's been a week since I last wrote anything of substance relating to The Story Of Me, so let's do some quick catching up.

As mentioned before, our new best buddy in the whole wide world Inspector Scene did his inspection of the premises a couple weeks ago, and we now have our work cut out for us. After a breathless wait, his list of our evil building violations arrived over the weekend, and to my complete lack of surprise, the front and back doors were listed on there as needing "replacing or repairing" along with a myriad of nitpicky caulking, painting and patching issues.

At first, this was pretty bad news, since the front and back doors were a real worry for me since we had been told by a locksmith back in September that there would be no way to fix them cheaply. Instead, they'd have to be replaced and the door frames possibly repaired as well. Luckily, a bit of moving around of the latch plate -- as far inwards as it could go in it's frankly-quite-large latch hole -- was all it took to get Mr. Front Door to close properly (or at least properly enough to make Inspector Scene happy, I hope). Mr. Back Door awaits similar treatment as well, likely this Sunday, and after that is completed, everything else should be relatively inexpensive busy work. Even better, some of this work will have me walking about the condo with a loaded caulking gun. Oh dear.

Thanksgiving was exactly what I needed it to be -- a nice, relaxing, largely uneventful holiday spent mostly on my butt (the evening of which was spent at my parent's place in Mentor where I played some 'net checkers and watched Finding Nemo and Shrek 2 after dinner with my niece). The turkey was absolutely wonderful, I am happy to report, as were the fixins and Sarah's homemade pineapple-coconut-frosting-explosion cake.

The next day started off the always-hectic and nerve-wracking Christmas selling season at work. With that in mind, I'll now take this opportunity to once again thank Zeus that we no longer have to work in the fucking Great Lakes Mall. Sure, I will admit that there were some fun times during the holiday season there, where it was a total blast working with a big crew of guys and getting a bit punchy in the homestretch from December 21st onwards, but some of those days were just awful - a 12-hour crush of unrelenting, mewling insanity that just sucked the soul and health right out of you.


At the new location, we strip-mall hermits have a different experience this time of the year. Yes, the so-called "Black Friday" was a surprisingly busy day for us considering the price-war idiocy running rampant at the Big Box store level, but what normally follows this one-day spike (evidenced again by our sales in the days since) is a weirdly disorienting two weeks of what feels like an especially boring, below-average month of business. This dullness is exacerbated by the total lack of any new releases of real consequence (unless you closely follow rap music, in which case it'z a weekly bonanza, yo).

Once December 10 comes around, however, you can feel the business starting to ramp up a bit as the days and nights gradually become more busier than you are accustomed to. By the 15th or so, there is no looking back, and the gradual increase suddenly pegs sharply upwards and stays there. But even then, the busiest day of the year (either Saturday the 18th or Thursday the 23rd this year), while hectic and relentless, is nowhere near as shattering as it was in the Mall back in the day. It's a different level of busy here -- one that at least enables me to keep on top of the ordering and receiving without getting overwhelmed.

Lastly, being the first of December, I've started listening to some of the recent Christmas releases and have already come to the conclusion that the Chris Isaak Christmas album is, surprisingly, a bust. I can't pin why I dislike the album on any specific factor musically, but it might have something to do with hearing this guy so upbeat and jolly when I'm so used to him sounding unrelentingly miserable on past classics like Heart Shaped World and Forever Blue. I guess, therefore, I'd have the exact same gut reaction if Trent Reznor ever released a Christmas album...so, uh, Trent? Don't.

Band Aid 20's new take on "Do They Know It's Christmas," on the other hand, looked pretty horrid on paper but so far seems to come off alright in execution, though I admit that the original is still the better version of the two (I'm kindly forgetting that godawful second Band Aid single from 1989, as apparently everyone else did as well). The melody and lyrics of the original are unchanged (sans that ill-advised rap bit in the middle), but the new production by Nigel Godrich is much more organic in feel, with guitars replacing the widescreen tres-Ultravox synths of the original.

Much more on Christmas music (and otherwise) later ... I still have a lot to go through here.

Peace.