6.1.10 a Downside of Home Business

Well, it has been an interesting few weeks mainly business-wise. Our phone lines have been up and down, mostly down, causing me to lose some business and upsetting several clients.

I thought it was just aol going crazy, I would be able to get online but I could only stay online between a few second to a few minutes. I generally had time to do one very small thing then nada. Then there were times it would try to get online but say it was getting a busy signal, which seemed like aol was busy to me. so i kept trying to fix that through aol for a week, to no avail. During that time I also got and installed netzero as a back up but it did the exact same thing so I realized it must be the phone.

When I checked the phone (which I only use for internet and to rarely receive calls because I absolutely Loath talking on the phone) it was either a very crackly distant dial tone or sounded like an open line. We checked the box, found it was outside so I called the company and scheduled someone to come out and fix it. The woman said they would be here in 48 hours to fix. It was a Thursday so they would for sure have it fixed before the weekend. The next day there was a message on the answering machine saying that since she was able to call through she had canceled my fix order *~*

I called back right away but they couldn't come till the follow Monday *~* The guy came Monday afternoon and we had phone and internet again. Until Tuesday afternoon.

They've been out twice more and everything has seemed fine through this weekend.

On the business side of all this .... business has been quite slow, until the week the phone started messing up. I was so thankful for all the orders that came in that week and the next but they started piling up and I got so behind. When the phone finally stopped getting me online at all I had 21 tea orders, 2 ebays, 4 books on paprebackbookswap and 1 painting. Every time I could get online I would try and get one sent out but by this weekend I still had 17 orders to tend to. But no worries because everything was working properly!

Until I ran out of tape and ink at the same moment. I got tape and got ink (drove 14 miles to get the ink refilled) and found out that the cartridges have gotten to old and are no longer working properly *~*

In the end I got them all out but 1 and that 1, the painting, will go out tomorrow. I'm so tired just thinking about it all. But still so grateful to have business at all and be able to fix what's wrong. All in all I would much rather have gone through all this and work from the homestead than have someone else be responsible and have to work somewhere else and for someone else. The downs can get crazy but they're my downs and that's what matters to me.

In the end a few clients were upset but not to bad. Horribly I should have written everyone immediately to tell them things would be late (I would normally do that if there was a problem) but this time it never crossed my mind *~* all I could think of, besides loading and unloading a cord of firewood, working in the gardens, chores, milking, loading and unloading hay, chores, making laundry powder, sleeping (I love sleep), working on the barn, all the feral kittens, chores and other stuff .... was getting the phoneline working.

ahhhhhh the simple life :)