Racing or Hardware? That Is the Question

Depends who you ask. If you ask Harry - it's racing. He left yesterday to go to Daytona for the 24 hour race this weekend. Since the car still has a Las Vegas BikeFest logo on it he can claim it is a business trip. You have to look really hard for it on the end panel of the wing. It's a little like playing "where's Waldo".

In the meantime, if you ask me - it's store operations. Not much going on at the store because they are working on polishing the floor so no one else can work. It's very, very close to completion; if we can open the store without lights. Not much news on that front. Still no idea when our lights will be here.

Our first Ebay purchase for the store arrived today. We saved 50% on our wholesale price from Motorola on 12 "like new" radios and two charger banks. You never know what "like new" is really going to mean but I was pleasantly surprised. Several of them still had the little plastic protector on the screen and most of them look like they've never been used. Maybe they were cheap because they seem to have been put in the washer and shrunk. I put my stapler next to one so you can see the size. It's definitely the perfect radio for munchkin land. I'm going to love using them.

Harry has mentioned the Mentor Program in previous blogs. We are almost finished. It's been a good experience and we've received some great insight. One owner in particular, the Griffin family, has provided us so many copies of procedures and checklists (even gave us a CD of them) that we swear they must be long lost cousins of ours. It's a father and his three daughters running the company which is 3 stores. I asked one of them last week if her last name was really Schwartz. Great stuff but now we'll be busy with checklists, job descriptions and Standard Operating Procedures.

The crazy sagas for this week:

1. Do you have Helvetica Bold Oblique and Helvetica Oblique on your computers? I bet not! I haven't seen Helvetica since I typed on a manual typewriter. Well, that's the approved font from Ace to be used along side of the Ace logo. So we need the font for the word "Downtown". After spending $50 to buy the two fonts and trying to convince my computer that it's not in a time warp and it really should let me use them we discovered that when you use all CAPS in Helvetica Bold Oblique, you lose your W's. Now trust me, I'm all for losing "W", but these W's we need so now we've had to change our logo to lowercase. Luckily we haven't printed anything yet.

2. For almost a month now our electrical contractor has been going in circles with SDG&E, US Postmaster and our landlord trying to confirm our address. We need to apply for our meter and no one could agree on whether we were 655 6th Avenue #1 or 655 6th Avenue #901 or 655 6th Avenue #A. This finally got resolved this week. We are 675 6th Avenue. How do you like that. I wonder if we can re-negotiate our lease for reduced rent since the lease is no longer for the correct space. Luckily we haven't printed anything yet.

3. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with AT&T to order our phone lines. We got a great number reserved (thanks Blair) early in the morning. Called in the afternoon to reserve the lines and somehow she lost our number during the transaction. I would say "Luckily we haven't printed anything yet" but she put in a request for the number when she put through the order last night and I received confirmation that we got it so all is good there.

4. Started working on our Grand Opening plans this week. Scheduled for May 1-3 so put it in your calendars. More details to come on the planning for this. Ace Corporate staff recommends we hire an Event Planner to handle this for us. Know of anyone?

Phew....I need to get back to ordering product.

Thanks for checking back with us.