In praise of the mail ladies

The Post Office is a pretty big target when people want to talk about how government doesn't work, or can't do things efficiently. I submit that they fall into that same category as so many of the great things that make our modern life so awesome - flushing toilets, paved roads, the inability to go two and a half miles without finding a Big Mac. By that I mean, they work SO well, that we don't notice the 99.9% of good work they do, and blow the occasional failure way the hell out of proportion.

Consider that the post office is mandated to bring mail to anyone who lives within this country's borders, six days a week. They HAVE to. All those grouchy rural conservatives who like to yell about gub'mint tyranny? It costs ten times more to mail a letter to their farmhouse than to my big-city house, but the post office charges the same for both. The fact that these people get curbside mail at all -- including life-saving prescriptions by mail, and such -- is subsidized by the rest of us.

Much has been made of the postal service's deficit. They're required by law to sock away an obscene amount of money into pension funds - ratchet that down to a reasonable level, and presto, things are more even.

I'm not opposed to cutting Saturday delivery, if it'd save money. But it seems to me that when you start cutting customer services on the front end of your business, it doesn't stop, and it's an admission of defeat. How many small businesses have you seen suddenly start closing two or three days a week, or reducing their hours to weird and inconvenient times, shortly before going under completely? I'd rather see the postal service go all-out, campaign hard to win business from FedEx and UPS, and get the word out that their service is pretty damn world-class.

Obviously, I interact with the post office more than a lot of people. But it's no exaggeration at all to say that, if not for easy access to post offices and helpful, speedy service once there, I would not be able to do what I do for a living. The post office is a business grower, a two-century-old economic stimulus plan that works, and in real numbers, pays its own way. And it's made quite a bit of our civilized modern life possible.

Big thanks to Beth and Connie, the front-counter clerks at my post office, and to everyone who busts their asses to get the mail out.

The 1541 Disk Drive Can Kiss My Ass

I was making great progress tonight, cataloging and testing out Commodore 64 software to list for sale. Then I made the tragic error of trying to load in a game whose disks didn't work. The disk drives, the notorious 1541 model, made that machine-gun sound, and promptly stopped loading anything else -- even disks that had just worked.

I wouldn't be so irritated by this if I didn't have eight or ten of these albatrosses piled up around here. They spit out errors like a goalie spits out teeth, and they go out of alignment if you so much as fart in their general direction. I have some instructions on how to get them realigned, but I haven't tried them yet. I shouldn't HAVE to. These temperamental pieces of shit were badly designed and terribly put together.

After reading Brian Bagnall's history of Commodore, the company, it's amazing to me that so much coolness was extracted out of hardware made so indifferently. I was having a great time, and it ground to a halt, like the heads of the drive hitting track zero. Screw this, I'm going to bed. Anyone want to take ten of these shitty drives, realign me five of them, and keep the other five for their trouble?

The late, great auction

I just had a big pile of video game cartridge auctions end. A few went for close to their minimum bids, and the rest didn't sell at all. I made enough money to make the extra work of putting the lot up in one night worthwhile... but Ebay took a much bigger chunk of fees than if I'd just put the items up as fixed-price, with no deadline for selling.

There are fewer and fewer instances where an auction even makes sense any more. I have a general idea of what I want for most of the items I'm selling, and I'm in a position to park them and wait a few weeks for the right buyer to come along. Auctions seem to work best when you're in fire-sale mode (and 9 times out of 10, when you're dumping stuff that desperately, most of it's being sold to other sellers, who will - wait for it - list it at a higher fixed price).

Most people think of Ebay and they think of auctions -- but I think most casual buyers are over the whole idea of baby-sitting an auction listing for a week, waiting around to see if they got an item, just to save a couple bucks on it. They'd rather jump online, buy what they want, pay for it on the spot, and assume it's being shipped out in a reasonable time frame.

I know that after tonight, I'm done with the auction format for video games. Again, not complaining, just observing and making constant little adjustments to the game plan. I think picking fixed prices, then periodically marking down whatever doesn't sell in a timely fashion, is the way to go for this stuff, especially given its prominence in Ebay's new search methods.

Enough shop talk - back down to the basement to root through more Commodore 64 stuff!

Nation of Islam 1997 Revival T-shirt on Ebay

The vintage t-shirt listing juggernaut continues, with this classic. Probably the all-time best funny-look-generator at the thrift store checkout counter.

Tohono O'Odham Nation Shirt on Ebay

Planned to list a whole pile of shirts tonight -- I have about 50 to add to the Store. But with all the other stuff I did today, plus a sick toddler to mind, I got about five listings in and realized I'm fried. More goodies, and long-winded ruminations about my nerd empire, tomorrow.

The Junkman Cometh

Earlier this week I drove from my home in Toledo to the outskirts of Flint, Michigan. It was a beautiful sunny day, one of the warmest so far this spring. I spent two hours with the iPod on shuffle, kicking out random road gems from Gorefest to Billie Holiday to D.R.I. to Bobby Bare to New Bomb Turks. It seemed like every song was chosen to encourage speeding, and windows rolled down, and general good vibes all around.

Made it to one of those post-WW2 subdivisions about noonish, and met up with Fred and Joyce, two old folks obviously married since the dawn of time. Fred was selling me a vanload of Commodore 64 items - several computers, a bunch of disk drives, a 24-pin dot-matrix printer, disks, magazines, cartridges, even the computer desk it all lived on in his well-appointed basement for the last 25 years.

Fred had had three strokes, three heart attacks, a stent, and some sort of other arterial decrepitude* (I'm signing Arterial Decrepitude to my imaginary label). Yet he kept trying to pick up the heavy old-school Commodore monitor, or chunks of the desk, and hump them up the stairs. His wife would yell at him, he'd grumble, then he'd try it again a few minutes later. Joyce and I finally prevailed upon him to go up to the carport and get the door for us, which he did, reluctantly. Joyce (herself 75 if she was a day) helped me get the desk up the steps, making a few mildly snarky comments here and there about "oh my, you got quite a deal on this stuff, didn't you?" and "how much did you sell all this stuff for, Fred?"

I felt good about the transaction anyway, but Fred and Joyce were just the icing on the cake. And Fred still had another retro system, a Commodore 128, still up and running next to the space where the 64 had lived. That was awesome - he may have been downsizing, but he wasn't getting out of the game altogether.

Shaking hands with Fred and Joyce, I closed up the van and headed back to Toledo, to the tune of even more road songs so perfect for the occasion, they had to have been picked by an intelligent force. Or maybe it was just that the day was so good, any song would do. I eyed a few places to stop for lunch, but then I got a vision of Charlie's in Toledo and their patty melt platter, so I hit the gas and waited till I was on home turf to chow.

That's the first fun part of what I do. The next fun part is illustrated above. What you see in the lower photo above is Fred and Joyce's Commodore 64 loot, jammed into my basement "war room" in a disheveled pile, along with a few boxes of other miscellaneous C64 goodies I've picked up on Ebay. Tonight, after I finish listing a pile of t-shirts, I'm going to go down to that basement and start sorting. I'll play a bunch of games, test out a bunch of equipment, and start my sell pile, all the while deciding what I need to keep to have a kickass working system for myself. It's to test future purchases on, sure... but it's also to program on, and play on, and to time-travel back to 1986 and high-five my fourteen-year-old self who didn't get to have nice stuff.

And then the last fun part is taking the "sell pile" back upstairs, taking pictures of each piece of retro flotsam I've accumulated, and offering them up for sale on Ebay. That's how I pay the bills these days. I wallow in stuff I like -- records, books, old computers, t-shirts, games -- and I wheel and deal in just about all of it. By the time I get this backlog of C64 stuff pushed through and listed for sale, I'll have twelve more boxes to open and sort. Or I'll find another cool old guy selling off a basement full of 80's wizardry. Or I'll buy out another used bookstore, or someone's death metal t-shirt collection, or -- hell, who knows -- maybe a trailer full of Pez dispensers or cuckoo clocks.

All the little mundane steps in buying, collecting, sorting, pricing, photographing, describing, selling, packing and shipping all this stuff... that's what I plan to talk about here. Because it's not all that mundane to me. I enjoy the hell out of this gig, and wish I'd gotten it down years before I did. I'm having the time of my life, keeping a roof overhead, and getting plenty of family time in while I'm at it. All those mundane little pieces of experience make a helluva big picture, and it's only getting better.