It’s always something

So, my opening day has come and gone. And huge sigh of relief - I currently have fifty more people registered than I did at this time last year, which is tremendous. It either means: this year will be even bigger than last year, or that everyone figured out how to get in on the cheap prices and now nobody else is coming. Personally...my prediction is we’ll fall somewhere in between. I don’t know if the event will be bigger but I think it’s fairly unlikely that I’ll lose people. New kitchen, here we come...?

Opening night was not without its stressors, however. A few hours before registration went live a customer told me my website was down. After a lengthy panicked search (remember, there’s no “IT guy” - I’m it) and phonecall to my domain host, I managed to see some tiny print on my web host’s site casually mentioning that they had changed their DNS settings. And didn’t bother to notify anyone. WTF? And on the day I open registration. So the kind GoDaddy guy helped me update everything and voilà, website back. Then I just had to email everyone back that had notified me my website wasn’t loading. Fucking hell.

Then as registration started rolling, the admin guy (in Texas) and I noticed some registrations were coming up as “completed” but with $0 as the amount paid. So we emailed those people and freaked them out...when it turned out someone else had paid for them. So that was another series of corrective emails. Sigh.

I was getting a huge kick out of checking my Stripe balance and wondering how soon the money would be in my bank account where I can use it - this new reg system requires I break with my old standby PayPal and use Stripe instead - until the next day I got an email from Stripe saying, “hey, it looks like you’re running an event, which we consider high risk, so we’re going to withhold funds until you answer this lengthy questionnaire and forward us copies of all your contracts.” Oh, and also they may decide to hold back a portion of the funds to minimize their risk. Um...what? How about give me my fucking money. So, I spent that entire night answering their questions and collecting the information they wanted. I won’t freak out until they get back to me - it might be some kind of formality and then I’ll get my money. But it’s ridiculous - and extremely stressful as my bank account is currently at 0 and I need that money pronto. I mean, seriously, wtf? And the worst part is, I can threaten to take my business elsewhere, but the reality remains that I can’t because my system only accepts Stripe, and they still have my money and I don’t. Ugh.

So, I managed to change the nightmare of last year’s massive feeding frenzy and hours of damage control and bad feeling by not doing tiered pricing, and the customers are all happy, which is great. But then there’s this other stuff. It’s always something!!