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A high percentage of the woman who come to CS are looking for love. That's expected. A high percentage of them are unemployed. That's surprising. Maybe they should be looking for a job. Better... a job they love!

I'm reading a story on Market Watch redirected from Yahoo! Finance about a woman who cannot get her finances in order. Her gross salary is $350,000, she's got $88,000 remaining in student loans, $170,000 in car loans and a mortgage of $4,500 a month.
Her question is "Do I need professional help?"
My answer is yes... but not from a financial advisor... Lady, you need help from someone with a degree in mental health.

Before finishing the story, I jumped to the reader comments to see what the other readers thought about this woman's situation. I'd say she wasted money on her education... they didn't teach her common sense.



Links:

I gave several months notice and phased out of a sales position working for a company who specializes in kitchen and bath remodeling. It was a problematic position and the company understaffed. That forced the salesmen to do jobs (like project manage) that cut into time needed to sell. There were other reasons, but I wanted out and agreed to finish the contracts underway and not accept any new work.

Something else (more to my liking) came along and I started working for a high-end custom manufacturer. It was agreed that I would often be called away (from time-to-time) to finish obligations of the other job.

They are using a design program that's considerably more difficult that other industry software but I'm being paid to learn it and make drawings for my boss along with some of the other sales staff. I'm assigned to follow up on sales leads as they come in.

One of the designers (fancy name for a sales person as we all are called designers) has some personal issues and decided to leave the company. I noticed some of her work is/was problematic that requires meetings with the owner and factory manager to resolve manufacturing errors in her designs. She's had issues with clients who also complained about not getting things in her designs. I don't know her track record but after she left they passed 17 leads to me she wasn't following up on. We subscribe to a client monitoring system from Google we use that keeps track of leads, notes and client correspondence. It gives reminders so if you forget for follow up on a lead it will appear on a list and how many days it's been since you contacted the client. It took 3 days to go through the list (while doing other things) and 4 of the leads are still alive.
She didn't answer email to a client who bought a condo in Florida and will visit from their New York residence. I read some email complaints from the customer who didn't get a reply, met with her this week and received a deposit to start shop drawings.

The designer who was leaving had a meeting with the owners to pass her projects to them and they would decide who to divide her projects to. We are a team and often help the other coworkers when something needs to be done. I'm made drawings and gone on field measuring trips to help the other sales staff. It's fine with me as I'm learning their procedure. While I have 30 years experience in this business and handle a wide range of situations, my forte as sales manager was fixing the mistakes from other designers/salemen.

A call came through yesterday from a client who paid a deposit and wasn't getting service to finalize the shop drawings so we could start manufacturing. Some miscommunication happened and he got bounced around. One of the staff who is assigned to write up orders is somewhat familiar the job was too busy to take it and suggested giving it to me. With several people in the room, the senior designer also stated it should have come to me. The designer who was leaving wanted one of the other designers to take it. When my name was mentioned she said "He's too Old School" and that she wanted someone else to take the project.

I laughed and said "I'll take that as a compliment, at least I don't have a history of pissing off clients."
She's gone, it's not her decision who should handle the project. I have the time and experience to deal with it. I went over this event with my boss who admitted he was overloaded (didn't followup) and so was the senior designer (who came in Saturday to take on the project) and agreed they didn't make the correct decision.

Sadly, the senior designer looked at the shop drawings and found some critical design mistakes that have to be resolved with the client because they need to be aware of the necessary changes.

So much for New School designers...

I'm surprised no one picked up on this, but the suit that Trump wore in Georgia when he was arrested, booked and posed for the famous mugshot has been cut into pieces and being sold. This is similar to the coffee mugs and T-shirts promotion sold bearing his photo.
Last week, it was reported that Trump is offering 'pieces of Trump' in the way of cuttings of his blue suit, but you have to buy 47 $99 NFT's

That amounts to $4,653 and includes dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump himself.
It's an online purchase and the fine print states there's no guarantee you will get either.

Appropriate, isn't it?

My studio / home office is in turmoil. For years, I've been working for companies as a salesman & designer on a commission or sub-contract basis. Sometimes, they provided a workspace, cubby or office of my own. When the workload increased, I stayed longer hours or took work home to complete. Remembering back more than 30 years ago, my design drawings were done at a drafting table in their facility. I had a portable drafting table at home maintained a fully functioning office, complete with phone lines, FAX, scanner & printer.

10-15 years ago, I abandoned the drafting table and started making drawings by computer. I subscribed to a service that allowed me to seamlessly remotely link my home & office computers. They claimed to have a secure connection and all seemed okay. With the approval of the company I'm working for now, the IT guy said there was a 'worm hole' security weakness to their network and redid the connection so all my files are supported by Google products that synchronize to all my devices. I no longer have to pay for the other service.

For the past few months, I've been working on a project that has lots of rooms. Main kitchen, catering kitchen, summer kitchen, 6 bathrooms, his & hers master baths, bar, 3 laundry rooms... it's a big freaking job and lots of drawings. Most of these dealings are digital, but my meeting notes are on printed copies, so I need lots of space to layout all the documents. I'm a paper guy and retain more information if the drawing is printed and not on a screen.

I used to have dual monitors before and downsized to a single 27" monitor for each system. Enough is enough. My eyes aren't getting any better. One monitor is 10 years old and the icons are starting to 'burn into' the screen. I have one 32" monitor for drawing and bought another that's new in the box waiting for me to get out of 'procrastination mode' and change that old monitor.

Year end now and I'm moving things around, archiving stuff and putting folders into plastic stackable bins for future reference. Okay, as long as I'm doing that, it's time to reconfigure the layout to get the added desk space.

Part of the turmoil is mixing and matching. The older monitors have VGA connections. Some have DVI, the newer have HDMI and the newest have Display Port. The VGA doesn't support ultra-high resolution, so I'm only using that on a computer that does email and web surfing. I bought some adapters that change the DVI and HDMI to work with Display Port so I can take advantage of high resolution with the larger monitors.

The showroom will be closed between Christmas and New Year, so I'm not planning to see too much activity next week. If I stay focused (no pun intended) I'll be able to organize 'my everything' that will allow me to put an end to the turmoil I've created.

I'm curious why a few recent blogs have disappeared. I noted numbers on my blogs for reference. Two days ago, I had 1,671 blogs and this morning, it's 1,666.
The list of total system blogs showed 71,200 and now it's down to 67,956.
Trimming the fat?

The first thought that comes to mind is storage and bandwidth. At some point, blogs and forum posts will become enormous and the cost of keeping data for years and years becomes expensive. CS is a free site and the need to eliminate some data would become a possibility.

Just a thought... It was mentioned (in a blog) that blogs that didn't comply with the wishes of administration would be deleted. I tried looking for that blog... but it disappeared too!



(updated)
Blog # 1,667
System blog # 67,957

67,259 on 4-18-23 at 7pm

From 1975 to 1982, I was working for one of the largest cabinet manufacturers in South Florida. The factory would turn out more than 350 cabinets per day. The most popular door style was flat with a plastic laminate face with a material referred to as Formica.

Similar to the way people call tissues Kleenex, Formica is the name brand of plastic laminated products

While this may not be 100% accurate, I've always heard the history of the name came from Micarta, one of the first companies to manufacture melamine resin laminates that had several layers of impregnated brown papers with the top layer being a decorative paper. The process involved heat and pressure and to created sheets of material that could be glued to boards to create countertops and cabinet doors.

During the war, Micarta switched to making products for the military that included helmets. Instead of fabricating flat sheets, the process involved fitting strips of the resin papers into curved molds that were shaped for the helmets.
After the war they went back into the manufacture of laminated sheets using the name Formica that comes from 'formerly Micarta'. Good story... yeah?

There were several housing corporations in Florida that built condominiums. Business was booming and often we had contracts to provide cabinets for hundreds of units. I recall many years of this type of work.

Recently, I received a sales lead to one of the condo communities with a name I recognized. The owner had some water damage and wanted to replace the cabinets. The condo was built in 1980 and I'm certain I was working for the original manufacturer of that kitchen. It had mica doors and a decorative scoring they had popularized. We made zillions of these doors.

The guy buying the kitchen is in his 80's and not the original purchaser of the unit, but he enjoyed my story about his 40th anniversary kitchen!


Thanks for reading my blog!

As much as I hate to admit it, a world without advertising doesn't spin very well. Products and services everywhere require advertisements for survival. Something on sale in the grocery store sells better when it's advertised, especially when the price is reduced.

Now, when I use my GPS and reach my destination, Google advertises local businesses on my cellphone. Maybe one day I'll actually use one of their suggestions.

& pop Quiz.
Do you think the sudden zero burgers from the Rays.have anything to do with who is pitching..
..who is scouting & who is kicking a** on the
Road without 4 starters ( all stars ..? ..

Nothing like a road trip on a broken foot....

True story. My brother went to the bank to speak to a financial advisor about his investments there.
He was told much of the staff works from home now, if he needed arrange an office visit, he would have to make an appointment. "Good" he said and asked who he should talk to in order to make the appointment. The response was, the person who schedules appointments also works from home and only visits the office on appointment.

So... his comeback to that was "Are you telling me I need to make an appointment with the person who makes appointments?"

He's thinking about changing banks now.