by ebbets55 » October 25th, 2018, 11:17 pm
Thanks for the kind words guys. I really appreciate it and it means a lot. I just do it for the love of the game and all you fine folks. It's great to get to know a lot of you. That's the true hobby gold.
However, I feel the need to shed some light on how this goes down as I really strive for a level playing field and maybe this will help you all understand the process and the hours leading up to the List - Tuesday evening , Game 1.
- Spend a month taking submissions from sellers, researching catalogs, building pages in Word, converting them to PDF, reviewing them with the sellers, revising, finalizing, etc.
- Spend the last few hours of the work day dialing it in with last minute submissions or changes from sellers - 3:00ish on launch night.
- Assemble all the individual PDF's into one giant PDF. Crap, is it really 127 pages?
- Rearrange the PDF.
- Smoosh it, condense it or optimize it as the file is over 50MB and that is not e-mailable, which is why I stopped doing an attachment to the e-mail and went to posting it on the site and including the link. Most e-mail servers have a max 20MB file size attachment limitation, if that.
- Leave the office just shy of 5:00 and race home (8 stop lights) with the file on a thumb drive. I feel like I'm holding the recipe for Coke.
- Get home and fire up the trusty laptop that has been in overdrive for a month.
- Go to the control panel on the website, upload the file and create the link.
- Go to Outlook, create the e-mail, copy and paste one giant ass column of e-mail addresses (my Master Hobby List) from Excel and paste it into the BCC field and hit send.
- Then all hell breaks loose.
- Undeliverables come back immediately saying that these particular users are over quota. Yahoo, or ATT or Gmail is delaying delivery because the e-mail exceeds 5KB (what the hell - every e-mail is over 5KB). There is not even an attachment.
- E-mails are coming in fast and furious and I'm responding from the bottom up - forwarding each to the seller as quick as I can. Sorry if my first replies aren't lengthy. Time is of the essence. Hit me up again in a couple of days.
- My phone is by my side blowing up. Texts are going off a mile a minute. Turn off ringer. Let them pile up. E-mail trumps. Can't respond to e-mails fast enough. I'll get to texts later. Having fun! (For the record, I'm a typer, not a texter - prefer a keyboard to a phone.)
- This goes on for a few hours when it starts to get late (EST) and things slow down. Get to the 75 or so missed texts. Call it a night.
- Wake up to more activity the morning after. Right coasters get up earlier than left coasters. Back at it for round two.
- Lots of people never received the list yet. That sucks! Most of the more desirable stuff is gone. "Sorry you didn't get the list" is the answer I hate to repeat over and over. Don't take it personally, I would never remove a valuable name of a collector from the list unless they ask to be removed (or chant Go Red Sox - JK). Row deleted in Excel. See ya!
- Thursday day - still more inquiries. Keep 'em coming!
- Now we are at Thursday night, two days later and just shy of half the lots have sold, approaching 50%, not bad for a couple of days. Most sellers did well. I'm happy. I know there will be more e-mails as I continually get inquiries from previous lists. Love it!
Hope that helps explain things a bit. I'm trying to stress the importance of replying immediately for the best chance of success, and if you are one of the people who didn't get the list timely, then how can we fix it? If anyone has any suggestions on how to do it differently so everyone gets it at the same time, I'm all ears. I can only tell you all (from here on the Forum) that I'll post the list to the site as soon as I get home from the office and let the chips fall where they may.
Thanks for listening.
JD