June 15, 2004
What A World!
Had a great day off (but if you read the illustrious Intern Diaries, you already knew that). Took the family to Sea World. Had a wonderful time. Just walking along, holding my daughters' hands was awesome. Fed a dolphin. That was a thrill. My staff would be glad to know that I wasn't wearing any identifiable clothing that tied me to HM. I mean, I took my shirt off in public. Good thing there were some other middle aged overweight guys there!
:?)
Sometimes when you come back to work, though, you are greeted with bad news. First off, the burglar alarm company called my wife as I was preparing to get to work. The back door alarm went off. On the way to work was all the anxiety (and prayers to ease it) about walking in on intruders. Even though I live in Texas, I don't own a gun. I had my cell phone ready to call the cops in case there was trouble. The good thing is that the door swung open this morning, so it wasn't very long that the house was open. Due to a delivery yesterday the door was left unlocked and it's not a reliable latch, per se, so it swung open from a wind gust, I'm guessing.
Then there was the fax waiting for me. Our distributor can't scan/read the bar code on the new issue. It's all my fault. The bar code is placed in a small box with a slight frame around it on the lower left corner of the magazine cover. The slight black frame on the box is one problem (when it comes to a white background, which usually isn't the case), and its placement too close to the bottom edge of that box is another. This is something I should've caught during the deadline proofing stage. I missed it. My bad. This mistake is going to be fixed by paying our distributor 25 cents a copy for them to affix a new scan-able barcode sticker on it. The math is 6,500 x .25 = $1,625.00
If you ever think of buying an extra copy at the newsstand for a friend, this issue would be the perfect one to do that with (hint, hint). I pray that God would somehow open an unexpected door and bless us with a counter-balancing thing that would help make up for this. It's kind of a drag. It costs about 95 cents to print an issue of the mag and we get about 1.18 per newsstand copy that's sold; and now our 23 cent profit is getting totally eaten up by this quarter a copy fee. It's a drag, but we move on.
I'm working today on the unedited (and lengthy) Demon Hunter interview that'll go up on our website and be viewable to readers that type in the code from the print version that'll give them access to this exclusive content. I'm planning on heading to Dallas soon to catch Demon Hunter on this tour.
Well, better get back to work. One more thing: I exercised for about the first time in a year on Sunday, and my body got a taste of that "exercise joy" that the body craves for our re-energization (nice word, eh?) and overall good health. I hope I can get a disciplined regiment going here on a daily basis. Maybe with the exercise machine pictured above I can get busy...
God is good...all the time.
Posted by Doug Van Pelt at June 15, 2004 10:42 AM