Employee evaluations; my arts and crafts business fantasy

1:51 PM 1/6/11

I'm not sure yet what time I should leave, because I have to go someplace else before I go to work. I have to go meet the manager at a hotel, so that I can get my employee evaluation. They do this every year. I know, it sounds very exciting to meet the manager at a hotel and get evaluated. But it will be done in a large, open room with other people there, so it's not quite how it sounds.

I'm just glad to get an evaluation. There have been particular managers, during particular time periods, who didn't give evaluations like they were supposed to, and we never got raises, not even small ones. And when they sent Peter to Milesburg, back when he was still working, he said he never got any evaluations at all, and no raises at all. Milesburg is one of the lowest-wage McDs around here, from what I'm told. My way of looking at it, after years of reading books and websites about Libertarianism and anarchism, is that I don't expect to be entitled to getting a raise or having a high-paying job. I believe that the government has made it so expensive and hard to run a business that they can't afford to pay high wages or overtime pay.

I have a horrible cold. I guess it's not horrible compared to some people's, and I'm getting over it now.

I'm having trouble emailing Carrie, but we have gotten a few messages through. I'm just not sure if ALL of them are getting through. She sometimes stops answering and then a few weeks later I get a message saying 'What's going on? I've been emailing you and you haven't been answering,' which is typical for me in the past few years, with my email harassment.

She and I have been talking about Curtis and trying to set a boundary of what would be appropriate behavior for me, since she is his fiancee. And I am very glad to be talking about setting boundaries. This is what I was afraid of all along. I get 'urged' to do something that I don't really approve of, but I agree to it, and I put myself at risk. If I scare them or give them the creeps somehow, or if I make them feel like they're in danger, or if they get sick of my inappropriate behavior, then they might call the police or get me thrown in a mental hospital. So I wanted to talk to them about boundaries all this time. I feel humiliated to talk about it, but it's necessary.

She said that I was telling him I loved him, in the notes, and that was making her uncomfortable, so I was trying to tell her that I would stop giving notes to him, but I don't know if my emails are getting to her or not. I tried to tell the truth: I said that I could stop writing to him, but if I felt like he was in danger again, like signing up for the army or something like he did before, then I would panic and I would be trying desperately to reach him again, and so I would probably start trying to find him and give him notes, assuming email wasn't working.

The feeling of humiliation: I can postpone the direct conflicts and direct confrontations, I can avoid them for a while, but sooner or later, somebody will always say, 'Hey, you're sending these emails or writing these letters, this isn't right,' and so on. That is what happens inevitably when 'they' urge me to do things that I think I shouldn't be doing. It's humiliating whenever the confrontation finally occurs. A false sense of security collapses. There is this feeling, whenever 'the voices' tell me to do something, a false sense of security, a feeling that if the voices are telling me to do this, then I can't possibly be in danger from doing it - only to find that yes, I am in danger.

So I'll see if she gets my message or not; I'll give it a couple days.

****
I need to get another second job, and I did put out one application and I'm going to try to go talk to them again, talk to a manager. But meanwhile, I've been fantasizing about starting my own business. I've fantasized about this for many years now. I would be happy with something arts-and-crafts related. I've always been artistic. I drew pictures when I was young, and as an adult, I decided that writing music was more important to me than drawing pictures, so I've neglected drawing for a few years now and instead have wanted to write music, and I have some partial song fragments on the computer, but that is all. I've also done some crafts like sewing, and when I was little, I hand-sewed a lion out of old scrap fabric, and I stuffed him with shedded dog hair from brushing our white Samoyed dog, Crystal. I didn't use fake stuffing. I think it's kind of funny that I used her real natural hair instead of that synthetic stuffing. The lion always had kind of a sour, wet-dog smell, forever. I like the idea of using natural animal hair for stuffing.

So anyway I've been fantasizing about starting a business, and imagining how I would calculate the prices and the profits and the hours of time spent, and all that. I would pay myself an hourly wage because I have to compare it to what I would make doing a 'real' job. Now that I think about it, I ought to pay myself the BEFORE tax wage. I've been imagining the AFTER tax wage. But in reality, the employer has to pay the full amount and pay the taxes. I should use that amount.

Sales of an arts and crafts item, like stuffed animals, would be slow. Only a very small number of people would buy one, and it would only happen once in a while. Months might go by without someone buying one. People will buy essential things like food because they can't stop buying them, but they are able to survive without buying arts and crafts.

But arts and crafts are the WHOLE POINT of starting my own business. I want to do something that I enjoy, instead of just making food. And it would be something that doesn't require a huge investment in technology - for instance, I've thought that there is a need for building shielded boxes for targeted individuals, to block against both electromagnetic and sonic attacks. But that is a 'scientific' project and I would have to do lots of research and hire engineers to work with me and it would require a lot of money, and it wouldn't necessarily be something that I would 'enjoy' doing. I could do it, but it wouldn't be happy work. Arts and crafts, however, is happy work. I do it because it's fun. It isn't necessary, and people will survive without it, but I'd enjoy it.

I'm categorizing these things as 'nonessential durable goods.' My fantasies all fall into that category. Stuffed animals are nonessential durable goods, and so are music CDs, which I could sell. Music CDs might sell better than stuffed animals. I could make a video game, too, although I would need help from people who know how to program, because I have only a few tiny bits of programming knowledge, and it's been years so I've forgotten it all. But a video game is a nonessential durable good too. And I could write books, and they are in that same category. Sales will be slow and occasional. Only a few people will buy one now and then. You have to advertise in a lot of places to let people know you exist. You have to sell it someplace where it can sit on a shelf without you watching over it. I've thought about consignment stores, where you give it to them, and it sits on the shelf, and if it sells, then they pay you for it. That's my understanding of what a consignment store is. The idea is that you can't be in a hundred places at once, so you will have to pay somebody to sit there with the item, and take money from people who buy it, at a flea market or wherever, and it's cheaper if you can just let it sit on the shelf and let somebody else take the money for it.

At Wal-Mart, a million different businesses make 'stuff' and then they sell it to Wal-Mart and they let it sit on the shelves, at hundreds of different stores around the country. They don't have to sit there guarding their own 'stall' and taking the money whenever people want to buy that particular item. Instead, Wal-Mart shoppers buy things from lots and lots of different 'craftsmen' and take them all up to the cashiers. It isn't like an arts and crafts fair where you have your own stall and you spend hours sitting there waiting for someone to buy something. All of that time sitting there is a 'cost of sales.' You're 'selling' the product by sitting there at that table waiting for customers. You could've spent those hours working at a minimum-wage job, so you have to calculate how much money you're missing out on by sitting at that table 'selling' your crafts.

(Yes, I've had a caffeine pill this morning. I noticed that I repeated myself several times in several different ways in that paragraph. Writing a lot without saying anything is one of my caffeine symptoms.)

I like the idea of a big building, like Wal-Mart, except it's a flea market, and local people bring in their 'stuff' and they can leave it unattended on the shelves. They could even bring local food products, too. Actually, at the antique store where I buy my bullion coins, it works that way - lots of different antique dealers leave their stuff there in the building, but only a couple of people actually sit there guarding it and selling it. The cost of the building would be a lot less if we were allowed to do it outdoors in an open air market, but it would be less guarded against theft, and more people would have to sit at each individual stall.

Anyway, this is all just a fantasy, because in reality, I need to start earning money RIGHT NOW. I need to fix my car's bumper, and I got the insurance money and then used some of it to pay my bills and my rent instead of fixing the car, because I lost my second job at Weis. Any arts and crafts work will be a slow-growing project, and I MIGHT POSSIBLY start making a profit, maybe a year or two in the future, after investing a lot of work into it.

That is how it is when you start your own business. It takes a couple years before you actually earn anything back. Don't quit your day job. That is always my advice. Don't quit your day job, and also, don't borrow money. I know, if nobody ever borrowed any money or took any risks, nothing would ever get done. But I think with the economy the way it is, and the banking system the way it is, that it's not safe to try to start a business on borrowed money anymore. This is a complicated subject and I don't have time to write about it. It's just my personal opinion, that it's not safe to borrow money for starting up a business.

Anyway, I like how it feels, trying to calculate my expenses and profits on 'nonessential durable goods' like my music CDs with songs I wrote by myself. It's amazing and unthinkable to imagine that yes, somebody somewhere WOULD buy one, at least one, once in a while. Somebody would. It might not be tons of people, and I couldn't quit my day job right away, but a teeny, tiny number of people would buy something for real. There would be the satisfaction of selling something I made, even though it wasn't profitable and I couldn't sell it FAST enough to pay the bills - I'd have to sell lots and lots and lots of them, whatever they were, stuffed animals or music CDs or clothing items or books, every month, every week, over and over and over, forever, to earn enough to pay the bills. Or I'd have to charge a huge amount of money, and have only one sale once in a while, but it's so profitable that I can pay the bills for a month on only one sale. Whichever scenario I chose, I'd feel good selling something that I made by myself.

I'm reluctantly going to start getting ready for work. I still haven't decided what time I'll go to the evaluation.