It’s on

So Friday my event registration officially began. After getting the kids through dinner, tooth brushing, pooping and pajamas, I sat nervously on my computer, poised to switch the system from “demo mode” to “live mode”. At exactly 8 PM, I clicked.

Silence. Nothing for a minute or so. Then...bam. 

They started pouring in. There were no complaints, no “it’s not working!!” panicked emails. I refreshed the dashboard’s screen over and over, watching the money pour in. After an hour or so I freed myself to get up and wash the dishes as a little break. By the time I came back...there was a problem.

Suddenly my discounted rate, which was supposed to last 24 hours, had expired. Panicked emails. I got on the system but couldn’t figure out what happened...until I figured out that the system had been set to central time, not pacific coast time, AND the discounted rate had been set to expire at the beginning of Saturday, not the end of it. So the system thought it was midnight Saturday, time to expire! What the fuck. To be fair, this has happened to me many, many times in the past with these midnight expirations - invariably someone sets them for the wrong day. Refunds and groveling emails followed. Ugh.

Then a South Korean attendee noticed their country was not in the countries list where you put in your address - but North Korea was. Again, wtf. This person kindly asked me to add South Korea because it will make them sad if I don’t. More apologizing, groveling emails on my part. And I can’t fix it until Monday because this stupid company is only open for help during business hours. Ugh ugh.

So, lots of problems, far more than I could ever categorize here. Mostly - I don’t know how to use this system. I was so focused on making sure registration would actually work that I gave no thought to the back end - how do I get into people’s registrations and fix things for them? How do I add people who aren’t supposed to pay? How do I fix the multitudinous country omissions and problems? 

I’m going to have to get someone on the phone tomorrow and have a long session to go over all of these issues. I’m not sure I can stay with this company if certain things aren’t changed. Right now doing simple things looks so incredibly complicated that I can just see months of irritating admin work ahead of me. At one point I even considered looking into buying last year’s system with a techie friend because it was so much easier to use. That idea is not off the table, btw. 

In other news, I had my biggest opening night ever with about 430 people paid and 500 attempted to pay. That’s way more than even last year. I’m excited and a little scared. But let’s just say I will shortly be able to pay my $25,000 credit card bill. Hooray!

I stressed out all day Saturday, still dealing with customer service issues, but today was better. I dropped the kids at the drop-in place and went to a knitting get together I organized. I’m still a disaster when it comes to knitting - I get such a kick out of it that I just fly ahead and try to knit over mistakes rather than go back and fix them, mostly because I don’t know how to fix them. Sigh. It’s hard to be new at something. Between knitting and this new registration system I feel like my head is going to explode.