Hammering away

It's my day off and I'm here in our apartment with the maintenance guy. He is here to fix the windows that don't have a track and hopefully, by the time he leaves, the windows will be able to stay up without MB and I having to wedge objects into place.

It's a grey, somewhat chilly day. The past few have been absolutely gorgeous, and I should know, I've been watching them go past the big windows at the Greenlight Bookstore.

I started work on Thursday morning and have pretty much been working non-stop until today. We've been slaving away with all sorts of things around the store. The floor is installed, but it's pretty much the only thing that is "complete."

So what have we been doing?

Well, for starters, we have a local artisan carpenter building bookcases. The employees (a.k.a. Team Awesome) have been staining and buffing the shelves that will fit into the cases. But also, we are working around a crew of Chinese construction workers, which made for an interesting disaster not long ago.
Day One we spent clearing out our backroom space and carrying in huge shipments of books from Ingram and Random House. I got to drive around Brooklyn with my bosses, picking up a really cool drafting table that serves as our temporary desk, and our computers which now sit upon the table. It was nice to get an idea for driving (and parking) in King's County.
Day Two we didn't have our inventory system set up yet so it was a "get dirty" day in the building's basement. Our staff got to work staining the 207 shelves that will be a part of the cases that the carpenters were installing upstairs. It's a beautiful "Golden Oak" water-based stain that will really bring out the pale wood of the floor. Also, the characteristics of each plank of wood really stand out. Hilarity ensued while three of us were downstairs staining and, even though the super had shut off the water so that the construction team could work on some pipes, all the water that had been sitting in the pipes came flooding out into the store. None of our books got wet (thank the sweet lord), but it was funny because we had no translator between ourselves and the Mandarin crew. It all got cleaned up, and in retrospect, it's better that those types of disasters occur BEFORE the store actually opens.
Meanwhile locals have been strolling past our big windows and poking their heads in. There is a huge amount of community interest, which is great.

Day Three we had the tutorial for our inventory system, Booklog. A lovely bookvendor from uptown taught us all about it. Her bookstore is called Archivia Books (and she mentioned being familiar with a certain Brookline Bookseller, who sells her some inventory).

If you've worked in an indie bookstore before, you're probably familiar with a DOS system, which can be straightforward in the sense that you have to type specific commands to achieve tasks, but also aggravating because sometimes careless managers might squirrel away important information in obscure caches.
Booklog is modern (and similar to the Follett system I worked with) and pretty easy to use, so it's been fun to play around with and interesting to screw up with. For instance, in Booklog, once a Purchase Order is finalized, you cannot change it, which is problematic because it's very easy to accidentally finalize a P.O. (I've done it twice already), of course, now I also know how to fix that problem.
Since Saturday (day three) my co-workers and I, as well as a team of incredible volunteers, have been slaving away at a shipment of 95 cartons from Ingram. We finally finished yesterday evening, having scanned every single book into a P.O. that we will receive once the workers are done with all the wiring and painting. I can't wait 'til I don't have to wear grubby clothes to work and I can get down to some good old fashioned book-selling. And maybe some new-fashioned bookselling, because in the modern world, my bosses have worked out a system where locals can order their books online (an independent amazon, if you will, supported by Ingram).

So now it is my day off and I am enjoying it, blogging for yall, and looking for more lucrative work online. I have a few galleys* that I'm reading, one by a local writer, Michael Greenberg. It's pretty good, and he will be one of our community lenders at the store, so I'm excited to be able to meet him at some point.

Tomorrow, I'll be waiting for a package from home with all my towels and curtains and winter clothes. If I miss the delivery man, I'll be miffed. I missed a package on Saturday, and even though I got to the P.O. 15 minutes early Monday morning, I still had to wait in line for an hour.
That got me thinking about the so-called "DMV" argument, as I realized I was going to be late for my job which does not offer me health care. If the government cannot afford to pay the salaries of enough Postal Workers to keep lines running smoothly and if the government cannot afford to pay the salaries of teachers who are actually enthusiastic about education, who is going to pay for the doctors that earn twice, three, four maybe five times as much as these lowly public servants?

I'm optimistic about change, but at the moment, I think the Greenlight Bookstore has a much better chance than the Health Care reform currently on the table. Meanwhile, I think I'm doing important work, whether or not I have insurance.


*(for those not in the know, galleys are uncorrected proofs that publishing houses throw into shipments to incite the book dealer to order/sell a title that is in line for publication. Who doesn't love advance copies of free books? I also have the new Nick Hornby, and the Brit actually scrawled his John Hancock on the front page!)