Well, school is almost upon us once again.  Depending on where you live, it can be a week or three, or maybe your kids attend an all-year school that started up again in July after a much shorter break.  In the two districts I’m signed up with, it starts in 1½ and 2½ weeks.  What’s that you say?  Two districts?  That’s right.  I am only in hometown and supersized districts this year due to my continued job of shooting pictures of cars.  I have chosen to work three days a week on the cars for now leaving two days to teach.  Of course it will likely be another month before I am needed as a sub, but that’s the plan.  As you probably figured out already, these two districts are where I have gotten most of my work in the past and so I stuck with them, losing the less productive ones, even though near-urban paid me the most.

So how is the new job going?  Well, I got my first store finally- unfortunately it’s 45-minutes away!  The one who had this store didn’t do a very good job so he was replaced.  Not the best way to start, but I’ll take whatever I can get.  Today, in fact, Kim (one of the owners of the company I work for) and I spent much time fixing the stickers on the cars that were tilted, stuck over unremoved adhesive from previous buyer’s guide (warranty info which by law has to be in the window even if just handwritten) or otherwise placed with a lack of care.  I think we did no less than two dozen.  The rest of my time was spent in doing four cars that were ready for me.  Not a lot, but the idea is to have three dealers (four if they are small like this one) in one day to shoot a reasonable amount.  The most I had in one day training with Rene was 42.  At $7 a car that was nearly $300 for the day for her.  Of course that was three large dealers, and even then that number is rare.  My goal is eventually 20-30 cars per day.  Another trainee may be leaving as his school just gave him a reality check- no, it is not possible to graduate in a reasonable time if you only have classes two days a week.  If he leaves then I am hoping to get one of the stores promised to him, but not the other one.  There is a dealer that is way over toward Chicago (strike one for the bad traffic).  They require the cars to be shot in their warehouse a mile away, meaning the cars have to be driven from their lot to there, adding a tremendous amount of time (strike two).  Also, the warehouse has bad lighting with three of the five lights burnt out the last two times I was there making it difficult to take pictures inside the cars (strike three).  I am scheduled to do new cars every other week, but the one who has been doing the used cars while Pat was training to take it over can keep that part as a punishment for his bad performance at the dealer he lost (yes, same guy)!

In the meantime, all this work has meant that I haven’t gotten the DVD done yet for my kids from camp- I’d better start on it soon, or just do what I did the first year- give them a CD with all the pictures, but that’s no fun and can’t be viewed without a computer.

It seems as if the camp series was mostly a failure so I guess I will move on to other things rather than wrap it up.  I just have to think about something to write about.  Work maybe?  From what Rene was telling me, I might be coming out of training and getting the first of my own stores starting this Friday.  All I know right now is that Kim (one of the owners) wants me and another trainee from Elmhurst to do a store every Friday starting this week.  Since there are two of us doing it I didn’t make a connection to having my own store, but Rene seems to think this is it.  Hmm.  Well, a less exciting post than camp, at least to me, but who knows?

UPDATE: Well, the dealership I will be at Friday is not to be a store for me.  It will be another store for the trainee who started after me.  I guess it just works out like that because of the one who quit recently who lived in the same area.  These dealers were already being served.  I’m sure they will start picking up new stores for me soon, in my own area.

Somewhere along the way I missed Monday.  Not really, but today seemed like a carbon copy of yesterday.  The problems that came up at work were the typical Monday problems.   Seems like people go away from their job for the weekend, and forget where they were on Monday.  Today was Tuesday, but it seemed like some of the things I had to deal with were the Monday issues.  Maybe people took an extra day for the weekend, and were getting back into the swing of things, I’m not sure.  I just know I don’t like work weeks with two Mondays.  I hope tomorrow is actually Wednesday.