My painter guy is still working on the walls. I’m so glad I’m doing this now, even though it’s going to totally mess with my finances and officially put me in the red. The fact is, this kind of work should have been done when I moved in ten years ago – the walls were bumpy, uneven, and covered in layers and layers of wallpaper and paint. Eventually you just have to have someone scrape everything down to the plaster and start over. So, that’s what’s happening. The good news is from now on I can slap a coat of paint on very easily if I decide to change colors. So, it’s an investment in the future. Right???
I have decided to wrest control of another aspect of my event, this one being the online registration page that attaches to my website (which I took over a couple of years ago after being royally ripped off by a friend who designed an almost completely non-functional site for me). The online registration is complicated because it’s all coding, which I don’t know at all; you have to set all kinds of parameters (prices for the weekend passes, price increases by a certain date, etc), integrate it with PayPal so you can get your money, send confirmation e-mails, etc etc. But the guy who’s been doing it for me the last few years does kind of a sloppy job; last year the price increase dates were all wrong and everyone freaked out, and there was some bug that prevented certain people from registering that he never could figure out how to fix, which I’m sure at least cost me a few customers. And he always waits until the last minute and stresses me out. So I found this do it yourself system (also set up by a fellow dancer, so he understands the business) which I’ve been wrestling with for weeks now. Boy, is it a pain in the ass! I had hit a real roadblock yesterday and somehow managed to find him on Gchat (he’s in Britain). He very kindly walked me through the problems I had and I learned a lot about how the system works, so I feel somewhat like I can handle most issues from now on. But he did one funny thing that I’ve noticed all the men I’ve ever worked with as far as web design, flier design, or anything like that, has done, which is not listen to my wishes and insist I do it his way, for no other reason than “that’s just not the industry standard.” I remember last year I had a guy design my flier and I absolutely wanted to wring his neck – he vetoed everything I wanted, again for no reason other than “it’s just not done in the design world.” For example, I had promised some photographers to give them credit in exchange for using their photos on my flier. And this guy WOULD NOT let me credit them – just kept insisting that you never credit photographers on a flier, it “just isn’t done”. I literally had to twist his arm to make him listen to me. I was like, fucker, I’m the client, DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD. He did acquiesce finally, but with much grumbling. And like I’ve said, I’ve had this experience every single time I’ve hired a man to design a flier, website, or anything else regarding the business. Is this a man thing? Is it an uptight designer thing? Is it because I’m a woman and not a man, and men just hate taking direction from women and have to be right all the time? I don’t know, but it SUCKS. Kind of used to it, though.
In other news, the baby is on the move! Last night he was bouncing all over the place, and it was hours of entertainment watching my belly bop around. Being me of course I had to Google “can there be too much fetal movement?” and found a bunch of horror stories about babies being strangled by their own umbilical cord, etc. Good times!!! Thank God for the Doppler. Whipped it out last night and heard a nice strong heartbeat. I seriously don’t know how women – certainly women with anxiety issues – lived without these things.
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