Day 305 - Busy Busy

One of the many hens and chicks in my yard

As I was heading out to my desk this morning, my boss and our outside sales guy were debating about how to get something measured for a customer so the sales guy could sell truckloads of merchandise.  Seems that the in house design staff were out for the day, and that they either didn't do or understand how to do onsite as built measurements.  The consensus was that there was no way that we could get anything done for them this week. 

At this point I spoke up.  Yes, I know how to measure for cabinets.  Yes I know how to lay out a functional kitchen.  I'll do it for you, but I want the sales.   While I don't get commission, I do get graded on sales per hour and I'm not stupid, truckloads of cabinets are big sales.  But I can't run over there until I take care of the customers I already have waiting on me this morning.  After weeks of relatively flat business, for some reason I ended up, busier than a one armed paper hanger this morning, following up on a final details for one customer and getting that order pulled, taking phone calls from several others, trying to pull together a quote and materials for a list that had been phoned in earlier, as well as dealing with carry out sales.  It was almost four hours before I could leave.  In the meantime management had decided that the place I needed to visit was a bit too dicey for an associate to go alone, so someone else needed to go too. 

Ninety minutes later we were back, complete with scribble dimension sketches and notes for five different layouts.  I had a customer waiting for me with a list that he wanted priced, and another who had wanted a site visit asking me to move it to Friday, but in the meantime could I pull together another quote and send it over so it could be delivered tomorrow.  In between pages and phone calls, we got three of them into the design software and drawings emailed out before I got called away and had then had to leave for the day.  Tomorrow is supposed to be short, but with three large orders going out the door in the morning, eight units to walk with a customer, two more kitchens to design and the materials list for a gutted out house to quote, I don't know that I'll be leaving very quickly.

On my needles, the beret is finally to the point where I've started the shaping for the top.  I'm thinking another evening and there will be another FO in the collection.  Time to get really serious on the Christmas stockings.