What a fun day. I HATE the end of the fiscal year crap. Always have, even when I was in business for myself. Everyone frantically trying to spend every last penny allotted to them in the budget, but all of it MUST be invoiced by TOMORROW...to hell with whether or not the product ships before friggin' December - we've got to have it on the books NOW. So anyway, I walk in and there's a note on my chair: We've gotten together and 'discovered' enough money to pay for 42 flat panel monitors (including 3 for me and my staff) at $329 apiece. Well, great. That would be a fabulous thing, if I could get them for $329. Pomeroy has them at $352, but I'm not ordering anything else from them, EVER. So I check with CDW and get a bad case of sticker shock-itis. Best my boy there can do is $468. Now I'm on the phone, playing the vendor game, wherein I confront him with the fact his competitor is eating his lunch, but letting him know I don't want to order from them - I much prefer working with him. Now I'm waiting on the call back to see what their final offer is, then I'll have to track down my boss and get final approval on how many and at what cost. Of course, just to further complicate things, my procurement card is still kicking out since I maxed it last month. But if I were betting, I'd bet that this will all work out just fine, so I refuse to stress. This is what I do, and I love my job - most days of the week anyway. (Side note - Blog's spell check suggested 'Boner' as a replacement for 'Pomeroy' - maybe they know something I don't :-) )
Like a bad penny.... We used to scuba dive as our hobby, a hobby which eventually led to the procurement/construction of a small dive trailer to haul four sets of gear and four cylinders. It was a simple but elegant design - a box on a single axle frame, with the beginnings of a mural painted on both sides, and dive flags at either end. The kids had helped paint it, with Stephen taking special pains with the sharks. When we moved to Nashville, we sold it. We didn't dive as often, and we had no place to store it. Nearly ten years have passed since that October in '99 when we came up here, and I hadn't thought much about the trailer. I thought I had seen it the last time we went to Greenfield, but I wasn't sure. Then Saturday my mother-in-law called to say the neighbor across the street had our trailer for sale. The neighbor was asking a certain price, and we offered a little less. She called back later to say it was ours for the picking up. Sunday we made the trip to fet...
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