Went on vacation for five days and decided to do a skip week.

Oh, boy. I came back to a swamped store and a swamped schedule. Summer is hitting hard all of a sudden. I looked at Sabrina and said, "With the amount of stuff I'm doing off the clock, you're probably going to need a full time employee."

One of my jobs at the store is to just go around and straighten everything. A seemingly simple job that is actually really important with a packed store like Pegasus. It would be so easy for everything to get out of control, to become utterly chaotic, impossible to find anything. Overwhelming.

I spent most of today just doing that; going around, checking to see where we had holes and what was missing or filed incorrectly. Meanwhile, Sabrina was dealing with customers and the register and she's being nearly overwhelmed. 

By skipping a week in orders, I didn't save any work. If anything, more stuff arrived this week than ever before, especially with the huge Magic and Pokemon orders, as well as boxes from Harper Collins and Simon & Shuster on top of the usual Penguin Random House and Ingram. 

Meanwhile the usual six or eight pages of books sold that need to be reordered ballooned to about twenty pages, single spaced pages, books that have to be looked up, to check to see if we have them in stock, figure out which publisher carries them, and enter all the information.

I do this mostly at home, but that's becoming more and more difficult too with the multiple publishers and random arrivals of stock. I make more mistakes if I can't see what the store actually has. 

I think Sabrina has pretty much decided that she'll need a Point of Sale program to keep track and I have to agree though I shudder how hard it will be to get up and running.  

The bright side is: this is all due to success. We're doing very well, sales-wise, and that just requires more effort to keep up with. Peak business, I'd say. Any more and we'd have to completely upend our single store person model and that brings its own headaches. Frankly, having more than one person in the store at a time means we're often stumbling across each other. I try to stay out of the way, but I can't help overhearing discussions where I can add my two cents worth. 

We've got time to try to work out a way for Sabrina to get all this done. I'd like to hang around a little if possible, just be an unobtrusive worker bee, if that's possible. But she's be in charge and I'll need to do what she wants. If she'll have me. 

If not, then...full retirement. Hint, hint, she's been telling me I need to "practice retirement..."