tiredThe pre-release party at the store last night was a huge success. For one thing, my costume knocked 'em dead. One of my co-workers got a picture; I'll post it as soon as I get a copy from him. In addition to my sartorial triumph, the kids seemed to appear to be enjoying themselves participating in the various activities, and best of all we got everyone out of the store at the end of the night in a little over thirty minutes. Our secret was making sure everyone in the store had obtained a pre-purchase voucher before midnight, so when the books went on sale, all we had to do was scan the vouchers, hand them the book(s), and bid them a good night. (We had one cash register open for people who wanted the audio or large-print version). We calculated this afternoon that the cashiers were averaging about four customers a minute. Zam!
I got home last night about 1:30 or so. I contemplated staying up to read the whole book, but instead contented myself with reading the first ten chapters and getting to bed around 3:00 AM.
This morning wasn't as smooth as last night. Our network was down all morning—an AT&T problem, apparently—so the vouchers weren't scanning as quickly and we couldn't look people up in the discount card database. Also, we had to manually authorize all the credit card transactions, and we couldn't take checks or gift cards at all. On top of that, traffic was of course very heavy and we were a little short-staffed. Nevertheless, we survived. We ran out of our non-presold copies around 2 PM, but by the time I left at 5:30 we'd received word that we would receive another 350 copies this evening. Yay!
And now, back to the book.
