So, I have this month job touring five different colleges, all around the midwest, selling posters during their orientation and first weeks of classes. It's for this poster company up in Yonkers, they've been doing it for nearly 40 years and if all goes well, it should make me enough to set up an apartment and work on animation and art for a bit. Wooo!
I'm going to try to keep a blog about the trip because it's kind of a neat job. I'm going to Kansas, Iowa, Ohio and Michigan. Left NY on Thursday, August 19th and won't be back until Saturday, September 18th.
Originally I was hired as an assistant for a different tour, but that director (tour leader) dropped out and I was offered the chance to run a tour as director myself. I've never done any sort of roadie work before, but it's something different and it's a chance to make more money so I said yes.
This is going to be a bit of catching up. But that's alright, the actual sales week doesn't start until Monday!
Thursday morning was an early day, up in Yonkers by 9am, met with a few other tour directors, set my stuff down by the pallets of stock, met up with my assistant Chris and went up to the main office! Time to get the van, get loaded and ship out! All hopefully before evening rush hour started and it became hell to leave the city via the George Washington Bridge.
That didn't quite happen.
The van didn't get there until about 11:45. The warehouse guy in charge of such things, Al, was awesome and called Ryder a bunch of times, but they only picked up once and said it was on it's way, it'd be there in 15 minutes (that was at about 10:30). The big boss, Erol, had to call before the van actually got there. This sucked simply because there wasn't anything we could do before the van was dropped off. And sucked worse because there was a TON we had to do once the van was actually there.
So two and a half hours of time gone. Grah.
Once that was settled we got our pallets and loaded the van, realizing only then that the books were insanely heavy. We'd fit 20 sleeves to a book and at the time, they'd felt heavy but not unmanageable. I'm chalking this up to our shared desperation to get the stock done and organized, giving us a minor level of superhuman strength that allowed us to individually lift and carry each book.
This is no longer so. Especially the lifting part.
So, check on one thing to do before the first sale - re-tie the books into pages of 10! That is going to be done tomorrow (Sunday).
Also, I hate pallet lifts. They're very unruly and difficult to turn without backing up and going forward a million times like a first time driver. If you haven't guessed, I've made a fool of myself several times trying to direct that thing. XD
Back up to the main warehouse, where I was given another copy of my checklist and then slowly, painfully, collected all the other stock. It was slow and painful because I kept thinking we'd collected everything, only to check my list or be told by another warehouse manager, Walter (also cool as hell), that we had a lot more stuff. And it had to be collected from everywhere.
The most memorable was probably the basement. The warehouse is one of those giant old brick factory buildings, which means the basement is all brick and cement and exposed pipes and rotting, splintering wooden beams. I'm glad I wore boots. The basement is also FULL of various stock, with two, maybe three passages here and there. Not all of the stock lied along these passages. In retrospect (and only in retrospect) climbing over pallets, around boards and on top of precariously balanced boxes was a bit fun.
This may all give the impression that the company wasn't very organized - this isn't the case. The stuff was everywhere, but it was organized either with other alike stock or in a pile with a bunch of stuff specifically for my tour. All of the warehouse guys were running around, working like crazy and there were three other tours trying to pack and get out at the same time - two of them tour 2 and 3, meaning really big important tours with a lot of stock and decent sized trucks to fill. I'm tour 19, the last one.
We managed to get everything by 3:15, met with Erol to get the Amex card and cash for the trip, as well as settle on a schedule to talk weekly profits and a bunch of other boringly necessary paperwork, then finally headed out! It was just about 4:30pm.
We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts on the way. Coolattas were necessary and delicious.
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