Now the Whole Story Can Be Told

The dawn paints the high thin clouds a delicate pink and the morning air is cool. Normally I would not be awake at this hour, but seven hours of sleep and too much tension from the last few days mean that I do not think I could get back to sleep again, though I still feel somewhat tired. And now I can tell the full story of what happened this weekend.

On Saturday morning at about 8:30 in the morning my father finally got a letter that was supposed to be delivered to him at 2:00pm on Friday. It was a demand notice from the landlord for his business saying he had three days to come up with the funds to pay rent for July or else vacate the premises, meaning 2pm Monday. This was because the business my father has been financing for the last two years has been losing money and we were nearly out. Before the rent was due my father had started trying to contact the landlord to see if anything could be worked out. Meetings were scheduled and broken and calls were not returned. In short the landlord did not want to deal and also did not want to come right out and say this.

Why? The probable reason is that the landlord thought he could get more money by playing 'hardball' than by just coming out to say he was not open to bargaining. There was about five-hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment in the gym. If we were to fail to get all or a large portion of this equipment out the landlord could seize it and demand money with additional leverage or sell it himself. The delivery at two in the afternoon on a Friday was calculated to aid in this and it nearly worked. It went to a manager who did not pass on the message right away and so we were stuck trying to find three to five thousand square feet of storage space and movers at short notice on a Saturday morning. And I could not publicly post about this adventure on the very unlikely chance that somehow the landlord could find out what was happening.

We also could not let on about what was happening until after the close of business at 8pm Saturday lest we end up designed by upset customers and unable to get any work done. So that's what I was doing all day with my father and my uncle. Finding space, hiring movers, renting trucks, and so on. And my day was not even halfway over as I sat in a truck in a parking lot about half a mile from the facility waiting for the sun to go down so we could get started under cover of darkness. As if sensing some sort of death were happening crows congregated on light poles in magnificent twilight. I wanted to do a voice post right then, but I thought it might not be wise. It would not have been a big risk, but I did not know and so errored on the side of caution.

More of this story to come in part two.

Ineffective Advertising Techniques

For the fellow posting spam to con_central today trying to drum up advertising business/interest for his new magazine project. If your magazine is going to be as well written as your spam I wouldn't advertise in it if you paid me to.

Seriously, what the hell? At first I could not tell if he was complaining that people were running down his magazine or that this was an opportunity for him to do it better. Upon a second reading it became clear that he wants to start a new magazine. Still I wonder why even mention them? It did not help that his opening paragraph was repeated after a LJ "bad html" line. Then he goes on to try an make out like he wouldn't be hurting this other magazine even though one of his stated reasons for getting into the biz is "flack going around" on a website that this other publication isn't what it used to be. And he wants to do a full color quarterly magazine on ren fairs and their people? In this economy? Take this idea back to the half-bakery, it's only a quarter baked at most.

And of course, no spam would be complete without the "(xposted everywhere)" line at the end so we'd all know why this will show up in our feed multiple times if we're subscribed to more than one group he's also in. Now for the internal debate. Is he worth the trouble of making a screen shot of his idiocy? I lean towards no. It is not like he's a famous fuckwit who needs to be taken down a peg, he's just a run of the mill small time spammer who's not being terribly clueful as he chases his bright shiny idea.