{"id":55653,"date":"2011-08-09T00:49:15","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T04:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/55653\/jet-bus-day-worst-days\/"},"modified":"2011-08-09T00:49:15","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T04:49:15","slug":"jet-bus-day-worst-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/55653\/jet-bus-day-worst-days\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Jet Bus, I Have My Best Day on one the Worst Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I close my eyes and feel myself in another kind of vehicle.\u00a0 The seat vibrates beneath me and I imagine the rumble of the bus\u2019s idling engine is actually the whir of a jet engine.\u00a0 The driver becomes a pilot when he announces, appropriately, \u201cnow departing, Line 112 to Edmonds Community College.\u201d\u00a0 I keep my eyes closed and see my bus\/plane taxiing down the runway of SeaTac.\u00a0 It turns and enters traffic, taking off as the engines rev up.\u00a0 I am flying.\u00a0 Somewhere. I\u2019m not commuting home on a bus; I am flying in a big jet plane away to some far place.<\/p>\n

Now, I can\u2019t say that I have some repressed desire to escape to someplace else at this point and time in my life.\u00a0\u00a0 Things are finally coming back together. No, I like the way things are going right now.\u00a0 Instead, this is just a game I play.\u00a0 Turning the bus into an airplane.\u00a0 Daydreaming.\u00a0 It\u2019s fun.
\n<\/font><\/p>\n


\n* * *
\n<\/font><\/p>\n


\nI woke up this morning, turned on the news and saw that the stock market was down 350 points.\u00a0 Blame the Tea Party.\u00a0 Blame Obama.\u00a0 Blame Standard and Poors. It was one of \u201cthose days\u201d when the cable news had a permanent tracker of the Dow Jones average in one corner of the screen.\u00a0 When I left the house, the Dow was down 350 points.<\/p>\n

I get to work at 10 AM (PT) and it was busy.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, we\u2019ll take this $1800 fridge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to buy that $2200 fridge, $1000 range and $800 dishwasher.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis $1300 washer and dryer pair is what we\u2019ve decided on. How soon can it be delivered?\u201d<\/p>\n

By my lunch break, I had sold $8000 in appliances, which would be a very good sales day by itself.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know it at the time, but the Dow had lost a couple hundred more points.<\/p>\n

\"\"After lunch, things continued popping.\u00a0 I sold a bunch of $300 dishwashers and $400 washing machines too, but the big ticket sales kept rolling.\u00a0 I ended up working 45 minutes past my shift\u2019s end to wrap up the loose ends that come with selling $20,000 worth of appliances in a day.<\/p>\n

I might have had that many sales in a day at my previous employer in years past.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember for sure.\u00a0 In what I do remember, this was the biggest personal sales day in almost two decades of working in stores.\u00a0 $20,000 is my goal for a week.\u00a0 I did that one day today.<\/p>\n

And the Dow lost 634 points.\u00a0 2000 points in the last two weeks.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just me, either.\u00a0\u00a0 There is almost more demand than me and my store can handle right now.\u00a0 It\u2018s obvious that macroeconomic forces do not determine each and every microeconomic condition.\u00a0 Yeah, we got 9.1% unemployment.\u00a0 How can a person actually picture millions of unemployed?\u00a0 Close their eyes and imagine?\u00a0 That is why individual anecdotes about business and markets have an accessibility that big numbers do not.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to say that the stock market, our national credit rating or the latest buzz out of Washington has nothing to do with how business operates on Main Street, USA, but when the media peddles panic in order to get better ratings for news shows, remember that for some of us (that $20,000 that people spent with me didn\u2019t come from nowhere), things aren\u2019t so bad.<\/p>\n

Yeah, the stock market is tanking.\u00a0 But in JokoLand, things are better than ever.\u00a0 If people are taking money out of the stock market, apparently, they are putting it into appliances.<\/p>\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I close my eyes and feel myself in another kind of vehicle.\u00a0 The seat vibrates beneath me and I imagine the rumble of the bus\u2019s idling engine is actually the whir of a jet engine.\u00a0 The driver becomes a pilot when he announces, appropriately, \u201cnow departing, Line 112 to Edmonds Community College.\u201d\u00a0 I keep my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,10],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-55653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-life","tag-joko"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}