Thursday, August 22, 2013

Oh, My God...are you kidding me?

O.K., it's nearing the end of the season, I'm in an extremely vulnerable place, I'm tired even though I've had more time off than ever before in the summer and today.  I've got the beginning of a summer cold...ugh!  I woke up this morning feeling crappy, but the weather had taken a decided turn toward fall so I was a happy camper.  Forget that this weather would affect visitors to town, at this point in the season I'll throw anyone under the bus to get things going my way.  Yesterday being the big party for Solomon, I worked the shop so Sara could help her sister.  The shift started with a customer who hadn't been in before, and apparently hadn't done needlework for quite some time.....a few years to say the least.  She was in the shop for about an hour going through racks to pick just the right charts and finally came forward with 3.  She asked to get the "stuff" necessary to stitch 2 of them.  Since she was my first customer I popped up (O.K. that should have read I slowly got out of the chair and centered myself) then went to find fabric.  It called for Pearled Barley by Lakeside.  So I put the fabric on the cutting table and she says, "Oh, you are out of the fabric."  I said, "No, this is the fabric."  She said, well the picture shows white fabric.  Which forced me to have to explain about the distortion in color that you see with photos.  Then she said, she felt Pearled Barley was the color of the thread as fabric wasn't mentioned anywhere on the chart.    This is about the time I had to start reminding myself "customer service, customer service, you can get through this, just smile and cut her some white linen and get over it."  But you know when you are confronted and you just have to prove the other person wrong....well, apparently that is where I was at that moment...so I took a deep breath, put my finger on the chart where it said, 32 count Pearled Barley Linen from Lakeside Linen and said, "If you look at this spot where you saw the Pearled Barley after which it states Linen by Lakeside Linen.  The fiber used is Threadgatherer."  So I cut her a piece of white and called it a day.  Then I pull the 2nd chart,  which used  Confederate Gray by Weeks and when I saw that the chart on this one also looked like it used white fabric I started the conversation differently.  This time I said, "As you can see by the label this is the Weeks Confederate Gray as shown on the pattern....to which she said, "So you don't have the fabric they used."  It's about that time that my mind started to walk away with my body slowly following.  But again, I said, "We do have the fabric, that is what this is if again you will look at the label and read it.  Again you cannot tell by the photographs the true color of the fabric.  But if you want white, I have that and would be only to happy to cut some white for you.  But she decided she'd take the Confederate Grey.  Honestly, she wore me out and I couldn't wait for my shift to end.  Finally 7:30 came and Sara was finished helping Mary and I was able to run home and forget the shop.  The kids had asked if I saw Hotel Impossible which began it's new season on Monday.  Since we are all waiting for the "episode" we are keeping an eye on this show.  This was the show I wanted to see as they were at a B&B in Baltimore and Anthony had told me it was so bad that the entire crew got sick after filming there.  So I decided to "On Demand" it and it didn't disappoint, or should I say Anthony didn't disappoint me.  He is passionate about what he does.  While he literately torn things off the wall on this episode, I can honestly say he did none of that here.  But it makes me nervous thinking about how they put together our episode using the most dramatic moments....fortunately my falling face first into the shop wasn't caught on film...at least I don't think it was.  Initially we were told our episode would probably be in October, however, since they have done the Baltimore segment, Greece is next and they were in Greece prior to coming here, I'm thinking we might be in the next few weeks.  I'm watching it closely though,  so I'll keep you posted.  I'm nervous, but I have to say we're feeling more upbeat this summer, and a lot of that has to do with Anthony and his crew being here for 5 days.  He changes your direction and here they changed what he called our outdated systems.  Unlike the people on Baltimore's episode we were aware our systems were outdated, we just couldn't afford or didn't know how to go about changing the systems.  Anyway, I await nervously for our episode.  I might get the kids to watch it and let me know if I should watch it....oh, hell you know that isn't going to happen...but I will watch it alone.  I'm sure there is going to be a little backtracking going on from all of us.

2 comments:

VegasJilly said...

I saw that episode too!! I can't wait to see the lankford episode!

Unknown said...

LOL I would love to visit your shop for the entertainment