28. February 2009 by Terry.

So……..its tax return time…and to many that means that bills get paid, money gets saved, etc……….not so much with me.   Lets see over the last 3 years because of my tax returns I’ve bought my 46 inch wide-screen LCD Sanyo….my PS3……and some odds and ends.   However this year I decided that I would build myself a new tower, considering I had to use my P4 for my MAME Cabinet.   So I was faced with a decision to make.   I had a budget of about a thousand bucks to work with.   One thing I really wanted was a bigger monitor, so with that in mind I decided on a 22″ Wide-screen Acer.   Suckers huge compared to my old 17 inch Standard res.   Another thing I wanted was a system that I wouldn’t have to overhaul again in a year.   I’m not a DIE HARD PC gamer, so the option of SLI was there, but I decided against it for now.   Storage was also kind of second fiddle on this build as well.   Case wise I wanted to go with Cooler Master Cosmos case, but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the extra 200 bucks on it when I still had my perfectly good Cheiftec full size windowed just laying there.   So, taking that into consideration, here are my new specs.

Cheiftec Full Size tower case

AMD 7750X2 Black Edition (I decided to stay dual core because honestly, triple cores are useless and I don’t multitask or game enough to warrent a quad core of the same clock speed).

4gb ddr2 1066 OCZ 5-5-5-15

320gb Sata HD

Dual Layer SATA DVD Burner

Biostar TF8200 A2+ Motherboard (heat pipes on north and south bridge chips, as well as some pretty decent reviews, decent onboard video and optical audio with onboard HDMI, future board for the HTPC should I later upgrade to AM3)

Cooler Master v8 CPU Cooler (good lord this thing is fucking massive…lol)

OCZ Fatal1ty Modular 550watt SLI Rated Power Supply

XFX 9800GT 512mb ddr3 Video Card (I could of gone with a Gtx240 or so, but for a hundred bucks more it just didn’t seem worth it to me.)

Vista 32bit (Student copy, plus I don’t see myself using more than 4gb’s of ram for anything in the immediate future.)

Asus Wireless Card

Rosewill Media Card Reader

Logitech 5.1 speakers (Same speakers I’ve had for the last 5 and half years…………just cant killem…still work great.)

All in all I spent around 600 on the system itself, and then another 150 on just odd and end stuff I needed for around here.   Personally I think I came out on the right side of it.   I didn’t need anything extreme, and going AM3 was just too iffy, there’s only 3 or 4 boards on newegg that even fully support it and ddr3, and I refuse to buy intel.    Upgrade options later on are a faster quad core (when software is actually WRITTEN for quads), and more ram should the need arise which wont be anytime soon.   Build time took around an hour as I had to figure out how the v8 mounted onto the board, and it was a bit akward mounting the board with that hunk of stuff on there.   Overall though I’m very happy.   vista installed in about 10 minutes.   Didn’t have to install any drivers really, downloaded latest vid drivers, and installed the board drivers and I was pretty much good to go.    And might I say, I installed the demo version of DeskScapes from Stardock………that is some cool software, not sure if I wanna drop the 20 bucks on it, but its still really cool.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that it has the coolest red ambient glow from the PS and the Cooler……….looks devlish in a way….lol

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23. February 2009 by Terry.

So…I took a position over at my south store as the ISS.   For those of you that don’t know, that basically means that I deal directly with my installer customers on a daily basis.   That’s fine, nothing I haven’t done before.   The problem is that the guy I replaced knew these guy’s for a really long time…a good couple years, and got to joking with all of them on a fairly regular basis.   He got personally acquainted with all of them, and because of that he has a foot hold in my shops in trying to take their business from me.   I understand that, I realize that its an issue that comes along with the job.   The problem is, It seems as if I’m losing business.   The amount of sales I’m doing are just  getting lower and lower…and while one can definitely equate the low sales with the shitty economy…thats not what my boss’ see.

First and foremost…my business is supposed to be one of the few that is techincally recession proof.   Our business model is set up so that we’re 50 percent retail, 50 percent installer.   Therefore, if we lose business in installer, we usually see a rise in retail (customers fixing their stuff on their own instead of an installer).   To my boss’ though, the fact that were losing anything in installer is a bad sign.   That bad sign leads directly back to me.   I feel as if there is a huge amount of pressure to prove myself to these people…and I’m trying………but it doesn’t seem to be working.    Me and my outside sales rep went out south to the bulk of my customers the other day to see if anything was happening that we should know about, as well as to introduce me face to face for the first time, to personalize me more with my shops.   Some shops went incredibly well, we’ve got a great lead on some hydraulic business with KDOT Osage, as well as a bulk filter order.   Thats great, hydraulic fittings are a shit ton of money, as well as the other pieces of that such as hose, equipment, fluid, etc.   Other shops were so so, I don’t really know what to say to an account that is a body shop that I could technically try to get, but I myself am not allowed to sell product too.   My east store is responsible for all of my dupont business…problem is that when i left the east store, no one over there knows a fucking thing now…lol   Thats the reason I was in charge of paint and body, and thats the reason I was selling 45 to 50 thousand  dollars a month, approx. 50 percent of the sales.

I’m supposed to branch out and find new business and stuff like that but yet my one coworker who has been there for 10 years, has control over about 30 percent of the business they want me to get.   Why is that?…Simple.   She’s got boobs, she’ll use them, and she gets away with it.   Don’t get me wrong, she’s a good person.   But I don’t like the idea of my talent being second fiddle to some womans sexuality and ability to flirt.   I know that she is a good salesman because she uses her assets to her advantage, but it still sucks because when it comes to running a store, following the policies, and general mechanical knowledge, she can’t hold a candle to me.   So…the question I have is…what do I do?   Do I go after the business she has to try to gain some of their confidence in me?   Or do I try to focus on the business I have and try to personalize myself more with them?   Or do I break down and go back east and take over paint again?

The sad thing is…I feel as if I put a lot of work into the east store and the paint, and to sit there and watch what its become…..I hate it.   I wanna go over there and get back all the business I’ve worked so hard to get.   But I dont wanna bail on the south store.   I feel as if the east store was a better fit for me and my skills, but I definitely have more oppurtunities at the south store.   I can make a lot more money out south than I can back east…..So once again I’m at a cross roads.

I don’t really know what else to do except try to gain some more business from answering more phones up front and just trying to personalize myself more with my south customers.  It’s just really daunting and sometimes I wonder if I’m really made out for it…

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