Ow.

So Mark Richman of MOBY arrived on Saturday night to complete our install of the MOBY point-of-sales system, and to begin our training on it.

Saturday night, Rob Bennett and I did the hard physical inventory of the store, as Mark wrestled the hardware into working order, clearing up all the issues I couldn't figure out, like how to get all three of the different printers (receipt, bar code, and regular 8.5x11) working in harmony.

Rob and I started around 7:30 PM. "How long can it take?" I mused out loud, "I bet we can get it done in 3 hours max". Admittedly, I thought we were going to have one more body with us. We were done SEVEN hours later, at just past 2 AM. I got to bed at 3 AM ish.

I was back at the store by 9:30 AM Sunday morning to actually enter the inventory numbers into the computer. I was freaked out that my estimate of 3 hours to accomplish that was catastrophically wrong, given the inventory timing, but I actually finished it in just under 2 hours, going at a leisurely pace, and spending lots of time double checking my entries.

(Originally Jeff Lester was meant to help with the data entry -- but he had an out-of-town wedding the same weekend, so it fell to me... He'd have probably finished in an hour flat)

Noon, and Mark started training Sue, Rob and I. Spent perhaps too much time on stuff not directly related to selling-TO-a-customer type functionality, so it looks like training will roll on 'til tomorrow as we get our first customers.

Mark had some programming related to requests we made, so, rather than hover over his shoulder while he is doing that, I decided discretion as better than, etc., and retreated home to lick my wounds. I plan on leaving the house by 6:30 am tomorrow to get a jump on the last fiddly bits of inventory management (as always, there was a fair chunk of stuff that fell through the cracks), because I'm setting my goal of being done with all of that (except, maybe, the mini-comics... and we might just skip it as being too-much-work, for too-little-return to get them in the system by about 9 am tomorrow. Which probably won't happen, but I'm going to try.

Mark thinks we should stay closed in the AM, to do some last things, and while I'll probably defer to him in the end, I'm trying to work it so we CAN open at 11AM like normal, rather than 2 or 3. We already cheated a bunch of customers out of today. Rather not perpetuate that, if it is sensible to do so.

Funny, I'm not in San Diego, but I'm pretty much keeping San Diego hours, and feeling that San Diego pain, too!

One big fuck up on my part: I didn't have the barcode scanner set up properly to capture the "hanging" 4 digits in a code, so I have 200-ish scans which will end up being severely wrong. Nice thing is, you can "train" MOBY in codes "on the spot", so this will be a fairly minimal hassle.

Ugh, my brain is total mush right now, but I think we'll be very cool at some point tomorrow -- MOBY is pretty clearly 7 flavors full of wonderful, and I'm pretty confident I made the right choice in POS systems; it is both sexy and robust!

More when I have another chance to breathe... I might even be skipping on the shipping list this week 'cuz I don't know if I will have the time.

-B