Under the Stars

As you probably guessed, I’ve been working like a stevedore over here. The garage remains stuffed with books, though I have slung around enough large boxes these past couple days to have grown the muscles of Charles Atlas. Summer is fast approaching and we would like to a.) keep the car out of the elements, b.) find the wheelbarrow, and c.) keep the books from turning  foxed and/or musty in the humidity. I’d been making great progress until yesterday when a bizarre computer disaster nearly sent me over the edge of hysteria.

First there was one order from alibris for a book I didn’t have. Then within minutes there were TWO orders from alibris for books I didn’t have. My database, however, clearly showed that both had sold in 2011. So feeling confident and full of righteous indignation, I wrote a nice calm note to the Powers That Be and explained the situation.

“Well,” says the Power who replied, “this is all true, but you relisted them on Saturday.”

What did he MEAN I relisted them on Saturday? Why would I relist books I don’t have? And if I did relist them why are they still marked sold on the database and why are they not on my other venues, huh? The Power didn’t know, but he thought I should purge and reload my entire inventory. Yeah, like I’m going to do something as extreme as THAT when the mystery of the bookselling ages hangs over my head like the  Sword of Damocles. So instead I perched on the edge of the fabulous purple chair and explored the innards of Windows 7.0. It’s ugly in there. The first thing I discovered is that all the books I uploaded Saturday made it to my other sites, but did NOT make it to alibris. This is likely because all of the others use the same format which is not the UIEE format preferred by alibris. Clue One! Am I good, or what?

So I poked around some more and discovered a handy tool on the alibris site that allows you to see everything you’d recently uploaded. I clicked on it and down cascaded a fairly big list, which was fine  until I got to the bottom of it. Holy firearms, Batman!!! Somehow I had managed to reload (ha-ha) a dozen high-end gun books, all of which were sold and  ten of which had risen in value in the last year-and-a-half which meant that my prices were now highly desirable! Forget how they got on there -- I needed to get them OFF ASAP. So I scribbled  down the titles in a crazy shorthand, raced to alibris, and manually removed every last one. By the time Imperial Japanese Grenade Rifles and Launchers bit the dust it felt like I’d sprinted over the finish line at the Boston Marathon just as they were taking it down.

After that I required a couple medicinal pieces of Australian black licorice (who wouldn’t?) to calm down and get my brain functioning again. Damage control is excellent, but  the REAL need was to figure out what caused the calamity in the first place. For this I plunged into the list of export files which had been saved from my old hard drive. There they were all lined up in familiar  rows of incomprehensible numbers like felons clutching cardboard signs in the line-up. And there I sat on the fabulous purple chair, a hapless victim, huddled behind the one-way glass gazing at each, clueless as to which culprit had assaulted me. The minutes ticked by – five, six, seven … . And then, out of seemingly nowhere l  remembered something important.  Whenever I upload to albris the correct file is always positioned  at the top of the list. But no more! On the new computer the list appears backwards with the old files at the top and the new ones at the bottom. Just as I had done last Saturday I grabbed the mouse and highlighted the perp in position one. Only this time I hollered, “book 'em!”

But of course nobody did which left me with that old familiar fear of star loss. Oh, how  I hate those silly stars used to rate dealers. I work like a demon, fuss over everything, and have the stomach aches to prove it, and still those stars threaten to burn out every now and again. But never in fifteen years have I failed to deliver two books at one go, so I figured I was in the soup up to my neck this time. It also occurred to me that if I owned a listing site I would never be so intractable. I wouldn’t. I really WOULD NOT. But of course that’s neither here nor there, as Eric so kindly pointed out. He also made the comment that “most people” wouldn’t “go off the deep end over it anyway.”

Of course they wouldn't. But  then I'm not "most people." This morning I had to steel myself to log on to the site, sans coffee and already dreading the vision  of just four stars instead of five. Or would it be THREE? Ack! It couldn't really go down that far, could it? Of course it could. This rating thing is diabolical. But suprise, surprise! Though the  percentage had plummeted just as expected, all five twinklers remained.

That last one's pretty shaky though. One misstep and ... lights out!