If you have run a business for any
length of time, the odd requests start coming just about the same
time as you are maybe going to show a profit. This puts you squarely
on the horns of a dilemma, turn away a lunatic or toss away a profit
opportunity. Hmmmmmmmmm?
Most of the time, if the lunatic is
only a little crazy, like artists, and actors and those wackos in
Congress you suck it up and take the job.
This assumes it isn't on Black Friday.
But you know what's coming, it has to
be on Black Friday cause the lunatics wouldn't come out to play if
you weren't up to your ass in alligator with wild-eyed, screaming
shoppers destroying your displays, waving money, and slapping each
other around like it was a hockey game.
The Ole Trawler having enjoyed the
pleasures of business for many seasons strives passionately not to be
a lunatic...but every now and then it happens even to the folks who
have been knee deep in the trenches.
The Ole Trawler and the Long Sufferin'
have a show coming up at the library and are working like dervishes
if that isn't politically incorrect and off limits and insensitive
and rude and all of the other ins-
which dot the landscape in these
strange and curious times and while whirling furiously and doing
sixteen different things at the same time while making sure not to
duplicate what you just did and still getting everything done and in
the proper order so that you do not embarrass yourself or the library
of the art community which has so generously embrace you all of the
longs and fruitful years and then you turn around and find that you
are staring straight into the eyes of a lunatic.
Yeppers, the Ole Trawler had become one
of those.
And there was no help for it you just
had to go ahead and be a lunatic and force some nice merchant onto
those fretful horns and try to do it with enough grace so that after
the holiday passes and there is enough passage of time maybe they'll
forgive or just forget about what you made then do.
So there I was on the phone, on Black
Friday calling one of the more successful merchants in town hoping
that they wouldn't hang up on me and might have the seasonal spirit
and might just take my crazy request and bail my ass out of this
panic filled quagmire.
Now most of you know all about the Art
Connection and what they do and sell and how they offer the art
community of Coos Bay and surrounds the best products right here in
our own town without having to make Jeff Bezos another million and
fatten the coffers of UPS or FedEx and stuff like that.
What you may not know is that they do
answer their phone on Black Friday and they do listen to lunatics and
they do agree, at considerable pain, expense, time and small profit
agree to take on a piddly-ass job and keep an Ole Trawler from losing
what little mind he has left.
So here's the job, I needed a mat cut,
time-consuming, tedious, exacting and not at all high profit-margin
and they did it! Or rather Coni did it and with considerable good
grace under circumstances where she would have been perfectly
justified to use an expression not approve by Tarsus the Good and
hang the phone up. Not only did she do the job as requested,but she
also included much to my surprise and delight a backboard.
Quick primer, a mat goes around the
image to cover up any mistakes the artist made in printing, painting,
sizing or mounting the image and of course to help focus the eye on
the image which is what the artist wants in the first place. The
backboard is a solid mat which allows the image to be mounted and
properly place to make all of the magic when the Great Public comes
to look at the exhibit.
I had cut a backboard because I didn't
expect Coni to clean up all of my mistakes and I can on a good day
cut a rectangle without screwing it up so badly that the frame can't
hide the ragged, frayed edges.
But when I looked in the bag there it
was. I was thunderstruck, flabbergasted, knocked over by a pin
feather and all that other stuff. What a deal and on the busiest day
of the shopping year!
So Art Connection saved my bacon and
you can just come to the library and see the results and see for
yourself what a first-rate, top-drawer, high-class merchant can do to
make even the rudest, most thoughtless, inconsiderate customer
satisfied.
And a Happy Thanksgiving to all of you
at Art Connection, you sure as hell deserve one!
