I’m trying to make this blog a bit more bilingual. Today I’ve been working on the categories. You can find a list of them over on the right hand side. For any of you who are more fluent than me, please take a look at what I came up with. I was kind of guessing on the translations for Blogging, Software and Uncategorized.
Busy Day
Today started off being woken up by å°å·¦, one of my employees calling to say that nobody was there to open the door. Apparently it was my assistant manager 阿凱’s day off but someone forgot to send me a memo. Anyways, that resulted in a quick dash to the shop to open things up.
Then the neighbor who lives in the building behind the shop came to complain about our air conditioner. I hadn’t really noticed it before, but one air conditioner’s exhaust points straight at his rear window, and the other points straight at his rear door. The result being that his back room was roasting these hot days with the AC frequently on.
Being a good neighbor, I got a handyman to come over who installed some fin-like gadgets to the AC which redirected the airflow up instead of straight back. The nice thing about Taiwan is you can get stuff like that done with a moment’s notice, so within 2 hours the problem was solved.
If you’ll recall, shortly after opening someone dropped the tune press and broke off the handle. I ordered a new one but to save money on shipping costs I had it shipped to my mail forwarder. I hadn’t heard anything in a while so I asked the Subway coordinator for my store to check up on it. She replied that it showed as having been delivered on June 19th.
My mail forwarder has a nifty system where any new arrival results in an email to me and then is logged in my web account with them. Needless to say, it hadn’t shown up there. I wrote to their support address and they reported back that they didn’t have any record of a package with that tracking number on it, and requesting more information.
I replied with as much as I could and the key piece of information turns out to be that it was for a Subway store. It turns out that somewhere along the line both the mailbox number and my name were dropped from the address on the package. It also so happens that right next door to my mail forwarder, there’s a Subway restaurant. In the confusion it got delivered there instead.
I’m very impressed with the response from my mail forwarder. They were able to figure out what happened even in a fairly complex problem like this. If anyone is looking for a US based mail forwarder, check out US Global Mail.
Also check out this satellite picture from Google Maps. The red “C” is the Subway restaurant and the building to the left is presumably my mail forwarder.
That mystery solved, it’s now on its way here thanks to Fedex.
Subway is having a special promotion tomorrow with the local baseball team the Chinatrust Whales. You can read more about it, or at least you can if you read Chinese. Basically they will have an eating contest to see who can eat Subway sandwiches fastest, and they will also give out gift certificates to some lucky fans.
I also found out today that we did the invoice logs incorrectly for May and June. We were told to write down the gross receipts for each day, but it turns out we’re supposed to write down the gross amount minus the value of voided receipts. Fortunately the Subway paperwork has all this information, but it means redoing a bunch of work.
Business Update
(Warning to Merlin: This post may revive some traumatic memories.)
My manager is off on holiday in China so I’ve been doing closing each day which means I’ve had to do all of the daily paperwork at the end of each day. It also means that Tuesday night I had to do inventory myself. The paperwork isn’t that bad, but doing inventory is a pain in the butt.
The newly promoted assistant manager has been taking care of opening most days, but on Wednesday he had the day off too, so I had to do opening and closing. Otherwise things have been running pretty smoothly.
Today we got a bit of a shocker. The main Subway office notified me of a complaint by a customer they had received. Let’s just say that the customer found something in the sandwich not normally included on the menu. It was also quite surprising because the additional ingredient is not normally seen in our shop and also is something that would be kind of hard to overlook when making a sandwich.
Once my wife contacted the customer the story got even more bizarre with her claiming things that couldn’t possibly have happened at our store. Eventually the customer changed stories and said it happened at a different Subway store. I still have my doubts about the whole episode. It’s a good thing that Subway has training on handling such incidents.
A few days ago I got a schedule of radio ad spots for Subway. Tonight we finally heard our first ad on “Hit Radio”. The advertising for Subway in Taiwan hasn’t been all that great, so it was nice to see some advertising show up.
There’s a new shop going in two doors down from us. It has been under construction for several weeks now and we just found out that it will be a second-hand luxury clothing store. It’s looking quite attractive and they are really putting a lot of effort into it.
I felt that this area was improving when I rented the location and since then there have been a few new stores open and some others remodeling, so it seems my hunch was correct. When the new MRT (subway) line goes in three years from now things should hopefully get even better.
Today I finally got a checking account for the business. Most of you reading this will wonder what the big deal about this is. In the US you can register a business and have a checking account open immediately after. Checking accounts in Taiwan are almost unheard of for individuals and hard to get for new businesses.
After first being turned down due to lack of credit history in Taiwan, my wife and I talked the bank into considering my US credit history and once they did they approved it. I got my check book today.
Sunday
Sunday we went down to Taipei 101 (tallest building in the world) to go to Page One bookstore. Emily got a book about dinosaurs, Maggie got two travel guides, and I got V For Vendetta, Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind, The FairTax Book, Freakonomics, and Castle In The Air.
I was kind of pissed off to find that they now have The Tipping Point in stock in both trade paperback and pocket paperback. Last time I went there specifically looking for it and they didn’t have it, so I ended up ordering it from Amazon.com and ended up paying a lot more with the international shipping. Oh well…
For dinner we went to Chili’s were I had a Buffalo Chicken Salad (which I shared with Maggie), a chocolate cake with a huge scoop of ice cream on top (which I shared with Emily) and a large Stella Artois (which I didn’t share with anyone.
Equifax Still Sucks
It’s that time of year again, boys and girls. If you took my advice last year to go get a copy of your free annual credit reports, it’s time to go get your updated reports. If you haven’t looked at your credit report at all, go do it right now:
Annual Credit Report official site
Anyways, if you recall from last year, I had problems accessing my free Equifax credit report while I had no problem getting my reports from Experian or TransUnion. Last year Equifax was able to generate my report but then would give me bizarre login errors when I tried to access it. I was finally able to get them to unlock it after a few days after finding out how to contact their customer service (which for some reason is treated like a state secret).
This year, I was again able to get my TransUnion and Experian credit reports quite easily. Equifax on the other hand “couldn’t verify my information”, the same exact information the other two CRAs were able to verify just fine. They gave me a PDF form to fill out and mail in. Almost makes you wonder if they do this on purpose to try to get you to end up paying for it.
PS To Equifax: I paid $6 each to Experian and TransUnion to get my credit scores too. Too bad I never got far enough to buy one from you.
Flag Burning
From Scott Adams’ blog:
I consider myself a highly patriotic guy and I understand how people can get worked up over the flag being burned. I love my flag. But symbols are personal things, and everyone is free to interpret them however they see fit. For me, a flag that I’m NOT allowed to burn is a symbol that the government is too intrusive in my life. And it’s an insult to anyone who died to defend freedom. But that’s just me. You might prefer your symbols of freedom to have as many restrictions as possible.
It seems to me that the great thing about the flag is that it symbolizes something inherently indestructible: the concept of freedom. You can burn the flag as many times as you want and the concept of freedom is not only still there – it’s stronger. I like that about my flag. I would go so far as to say it’s my flag’s best feature.
CD, Baby!
This is really what CDBaby.com wrote on my receipt:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, June 28th.I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Press, Release!
My friend’s new business, AsianParent.com has issued a press release:
AsianParent.com’s New Website Helps Parents Preserve Chinese Culture and Language for Their Children
AsianParent.com launches to help parents share the Chinese language and culture with their children.
San Jose, CA (PRWEB) June 28, 2006 — AsianParent.com today announced the launch of their new website designed to provide a large selection of books, DVDs, and educational products to help parents to educate their children in their native language and share their cultural heritage.
Bonanza
Today saw a bonanza of deliveries, with a bundle of US magazines from my mail forwarder, books and CDs from Amazon, and the aforementioned Fatboy Slim CD/DVD from CD Japan. Other CDs include Zero 7’s new release The Garden, Tina Dico’s In The Red, and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies. Books include The Tipping Point, Parable of the Talents, Against The Odds, and Learned Optimism.
Another good week
I just finished up the weekly paperwork and we had another good week, though not nearly as good as last week. The upcoming week will be interesting. My manager is taking 10 days off to go see his wife in mainland China. We have two employees who will be taking on most of his responsibilities, but I’ll need to come do the daily paperwork each night, and inventory next Tuesday.