In the midst of my crazy work marathon that I talked about yesterday, I almost forgot that I technically have a couple of other little part time jobs that are more related to my academic aspirations that I have let fall to the wayside over the past few days. I decided that since my store marathon of working was ending at noon today that I needed to catch up on my life in many ways, one of which was to head downtown to the publications company that I work for to see what I've missed this week. Luckily it's summertime and things are relatively slow with students being out of town, few classes going on, and no big textbook orders for the Fall semester happening quite yet. I was happy to find that I only had one phone message waiting for me on my answering machine at the office and that there were only two pieces of mail containing orders that had to be filled. My job is only part time, so although I'm still getting paid, I'm only getting paid an hourly rate for when I'm there. I'm pretty much my own boss, so as long as I keep up on what needs to be done at the office, I'm fine with taking these little extended times off when other important things surface that I need to attend to. I do have an assistant, but she only comes in if I call her and let her know that I had extra things for her to do.

Although I would have liked to be laying down on my couch and taking a nap on my first afternoon off in almost a week, it felt really great to get down to the office and get back into the swing of things. Sometimes I tend to get so caught up in my regular job that I forget what it is that I really do during the rest of the year. Of course I'm always thinking about my field of study, but I get side tracked when there is work to do at the store. I had made a list for myself of things to get accomplished at the publishing company over the summer months that I wanted to have finished before classes started back up at the end of August, and thus far I have only had the chance to cross a few things off of that list. Today I decided that I needed to get cracking and make some progress. I ended up calling my assistant, and she came down to the office to help me make some headway on the list. Between the two of us, we were able to delve into several important projects, and by the end of the day we had really done a lot of work.

One of the most important things that I needed to do was to update a list of our standing order customers. It's very important to keep this list current and the customers on it happy, because it is their business that keeps us afloat. Most of the orders that we take our pre-paid by check or money order only, but with our standing orders, since they have signed a contract with us, we are able to send out our new titles to them with a pro forma invoice and then wait for payment. It may sound a little bit risky to do business in such a manner, but believe it or not, companies all over the world do business that way. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable having the publishing group front the money for the whole process and then just sitting back and waiting for the checks to come in the mail. The groups who have standing orders with us technically have no obligation to keep the order and can cancel any time by just returning the new materials to us. That leaves us open for potential problems, since we judge the number of copies of a new title that we will print on the number of standing orders that we have. Therefore we plan on a set amount of profit on top of the printing and shipping costs, and anything that we sell on top of that is just gravy. Again, it sounds scary, but this is the way that our student run publishing group has been operating for the last forty years, so far be it from me to go and change too much of a pretty good thing.