Mainstream Melodrama

I awoke early this morning about, 4:30. My internal alarm didn't care that today is a holiday.

I got up and wandered into the living room to do my stretching exercises and have a bit of prayer time, then on into the office to boot up the computers and see what awaited me this day.

As usual, I wiled away the early morning doing web site stuff and bookkeeping. About 8:00 I went into the kitchen and fixed breakfast: scrambled eggs, turkey-sausage, muffins, banana, hot tea and cranberry juice, placed it on our Bed Trays and took it into the bedroom to serve my beloved.

Our breakfast tray tables are one of the very first sets we produced, many years ago and they’ve seen a lot of use. They are just as lovely and sturdy as the day I built them. I used to cook and serve breakfast in bed once a week, every week, but lately we’ve had precious few days, even on weekends, where we could afford the time for this. Today is different. It’s Labor Day and we specifically planned to take some time for ourselves. We've earned it.

As we ate, the sun was just coming up over the mountain crest behind us, spilling its golden rays across the valley. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves. Through the bedroom windw we could see a squadron of Gold Finches flitting amongst the trees, their bright yellow bodies bursting with color when the sun’s ray found them. Other birds chirped and twittered melodiously.

It was a beautiful, peaceful mountain morning.

But not far from the forefront of my mind was the knowledge that just a few hundred miles from here, cities lie devastated, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and – at least temporarily – homeless. Perhaps thousands have died. You’ve seen the reports, I don’t need to tell you about that. But it was a sobering thought, and I recounted my blessings.

After breakfast I went to work, as I do most every day. Yes, it’s a holiday; but I am not quite caught up, so I must get some things done. But it will be a short work day. I have to lacquer 6 TV tray tables. Once that’s done, I’ll go inside, stretch out on the couch and listen to an audio book. Who knows, I might even take a nap. Such hedonism!

As for new stuff this month: we have made a few changes to our policies. These come as a result of a problem we’ve been having recently.

First, I must admit that we’ve become spoiled. In the past, our customers tended to all be intelligent, thoughtful people who were capable of looking at the facts presented and making informed choices that met their needs and desires. We rarely had to take them by the hand and lead them through the process of ordering a piece of custom furniture.

But, since our web site has attained very favorable placement in Google, we’ve been getting more and more people who don’t seem to bother reading any of the information presented to them. And we’ve had an increasing number of people getting huffy with us because they misunderstood some aspect or another of the process.

Therefore from here on out all LTL truck deliveries will be considered residential, and a lift gate equipped truck will be ordered on all orders weighing over 100 pounds.

We are also ‘prequalifying’ those requesting a bid on a piece of furniture. Once they tell us in writing that they have been to our web site, have looked at pictures, pricing and estimated delivery time on anything similar to what they want built, and have looked at our policies, we will spend the time – sometimes as much as 5 hours – producing a design sketch, taking off a materials list, searching out unusual hardware needed and producing a cost estimate. We’ve wasted too much time doing these things for people who “had no idea…”

We’re still trying to figure out how to prevent people who wander into Smoky Mountain Woodworks from mistaking us for Amazon.com and expecting to receive the item they ordered in a week or so. There have been three such people in as many weeks. One of these ordered a pair of Pin Rail Shelves. We processed her deposit, e-mailed her invoice and placed her on the production schedule for around next March. Two weeks later she wrote the cursory note of “WHEN IS MY ORDER GOING TO SHIP?!”

In discussing the matter with her we found that she did not see any production time indicators on our web page, she did not see that her order in the shopping cart was a deposit on custom built shelves and she did not see the delivery date on the Invoice. She saw a picture, clicked a button and entered her credit card number.

This, of course is entirely our fault for being so unclear. So we produced her shelves by working them in around other orders. When it was time to pay her balance, she argued that she had seen a payment to us on her credit card bill, she was sure she’d paid us. I explained that this was her deposit payment, the balance and shipping was now due. Then she claimed she could not find her listing in the production schedule. I instructed her to look way down there near the bottom, not at the top. She had no right to be at the top. It took another week for her to figure out how to make her final payment.

If this is what it means to become ‘mainstream’ I think I preferred being an obscure web site.


Moving on…
We’ve added a new product. A customer had us design a heavy duty version of our TV Tray Tables. It’s designed along the same lines of our classic tray tables, but more robust.

Another new product that is under development is a variation of our CD End Table that will accommodate the book shaped DVD cases that most movies come in these days. Be watching for this…

So much for this edition. Hope you enjoyed your Labor Day!