Mike Literman

So I’m on vacation. I don’t normally go, but we went to the Outer Banks last year and had a great time. “Sun, Sand, and Fun”. We decided to do it again. So after a 13 hour car ride spanning the hours of 12am Friday and 1pm Saturday, we made it.

The house is nice. Nine bedrooms, something like 7 bathrooms, movie theater, entertainment room, and so on. It’s nice. No one would actually live here, but it’s a vacation home. We’ve got 13 people here now and it’s going well. A few hangups, which I should mention…

Number one with a bullet would have to be the fact that it is 60 degrees and has been raining the last two days. Could not be more of a bummer since it’s a “beach” vacation.

Two is that there was an arcade console in the game room which I was pretty psyched about, and even more excited when I found out that it was one of those old Nintendo 10 game systems. I checked it out and it was Double Dragon, Super Mario 1 and 3, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, and Gauntlet. The “start” button is completely disconnected and the left joystick is wicked broken so it’s unplayable. Bummer.

We’re trying to make the most of the time we have here but Weather.com is not making me too hopeful.

You know me, right? You’ve met me or seen my pictures on this website.

Today at Subway, the cashier, a black man, said that I looked like Justin Timberlake. He almost seemed star struck. I told him that’s a wonderful thing and that I have never heard that before.

I love that black man. I love others, too, but this man in particular made the cut today.

I forgot one. It was only a matter of time. This was a doozy, too. 2 and a half years. How could I forget it?! I don’t know. Shall we continue? Let’s…

After my sad position at West49 came to a close, I wasn’t ready to jump into bed with “the real world” so I decided to get another skate shop job. So in two weeks I had it. It was a local shop that had been around for a bunch of years. There were two of them in the area but they were basically completely different shops except for the name. I started working on the floor, selling everything. Decks, clothes, shoes, snowboards, and everything else they crammed in there. We always had so much stock. It was never empty, ever. It was a cool job because corporate reps would come in and show us what next season’s line was going to look like. Sometimes we would get stuff for free which is always awesome.

After a while, my boss caught on that I was computer savvy and hired me to do the site for the company, which when completed, he paid me $63. To this date, I find it hilarious and wouldn’t have it any other way. I also started doing the eBay store. That was fun at the start when it was like 75%/25% working the floor vs. working online. That quickly switched, though. Soon, I would be coming in and working all day on the computer. Answering hundreds of emails and selling a few items. It was a lot of work. A lot of running around finding what I could sell. It got tough because there was only so much in the store that I could sell and then resell.

It went on like this for a year and a half or so. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t desirable. My boss would start buying things specifically for eBay which he got God knows where and paid next to nothing for it. I wish I had his guys because he was getting stuff cheap. So cheap that it led to his next endeavor…the flea market.

This was something else. Here was my schedule:
Get up at around 6 on Saturday
Drive to my boss’s house to get his truck
Drive to the shop to get all the merchandise
Load it all up
Drive to the flea market and set up by 8am
Sell all day
Pack everything that was left over at about 3.30.
Drive back to my boss’ house
Get my car and drive home.
Get up on Sunday and do it all over again except at the end of the day, bring everything back to the shop and unload it.

It was tedious and at one point, when it was raining I sat under the tent by myself, with no customers, surrounded shoulder to shoulder with moist merch hating my life.

So the end? Lame, to say the least. My boss was getting these snowboards for wicked cheap. Like deck and bindings for $120 or something. A person came in and I sold them to her for $250. My boss came in, saw “what I had done” and fired me on the spot. I left without saying a word. It was nuts. I had no idea what was going on. I drove home and didn’t say anything. I really did bend over backwards to do everything for this guy and this is what I got. Shortly afterwards he called me and told me that he’d pay me for two weeks until I found another job which was his way of saying sorry. I’ve seen him once since then which was…summer of ’05.

My this installment, I will carefully describe my position at a print shop. This place made vinyl graphics primarily, for both auto and business storefronts. They were good at it, too. They had one guy, Joe, who did all the work, though. I felt really bad for him because he always had ten things on his plate to do. On top of that, they started to get into other avenues like embroidery, silk screening, and web design. The latter is where I come in. Cut to the interview.

My friend Matt worked for this company and left because it was pretty bad, but I needed a job and this place at least did what I wanted to do. I sat down with my future boss and he told me that there was all this web work coming in and I would be working with clients as well as working our personal site. Half of that was a lie.

So first day, I start working. I’ve got my own little setup and a desk and I’m working and everything is good for the first few months. We’ll say three months, if I have to date it. In that time I did a lot of stuff. It was kind of cool. I would do a few hours of computer work, then I would strip vinyl, or prep a car for decals, or cut down board for vinyl application. I didn’t mind it. It was a nice change of pace. I learned a lot about the whole industry and it was informative.

Here’s what was terrible. My boss was pretty terrible. Think Michael Scott in all his glory but with less paper and less fun. That’s about it. I think that I nailed it.

So a few months down the line, we moved to a different location. That kind of sucked because I lived like a mile and a half from the initial location and then it was like ten miles away. It’s fine. I’m not complaining about that. So we moved. The problem was that the old location was finishing up old jobs before they moved all their equipment to the new location. Computers can move, so I could move as well. I worked by myself in this place for about two weeks. One week I spent like 10 hours setting up the phone systems, not because I wasted my time, but because my boss needed to know everything about the phones. Being there by myself led me to other tasks, like picking up dog poop, taking out the garbage, and getting things out of a zero-extra-space garage. I’m surprised that I didn’t impale myself on anything. Oh, remember that lie I was talking to you about? Here’s the explanation. We didn’t take on any clients. None. Not one. Not even a two day “banger”. I just worked on the internal site day in, day out. It got redundant. Build this page, build this calculator, build this page, add this picture of my dog to the site. It was bad. The site was fine. The codebase left a little to be desired, but I cleaned it up.

Onto my demise…
As the site neared completion, and with no new work coming in, I put myself out of business. So one week I would work 40 hours, then 30, then 20, then “On Call”. I would go two, three, five days without a call. After I went two weeks with no call I considered it over. It was basically a lame way of laying me off or firing me without having any sort of confrontation.

After I left PacSun, I went immediately to a place called “West49”. It was a Canadian based skate shop that was on par, if not entirely inspired by, PacSun. It was more skate cultured and actually sold decks. I loved making decks. I could do it all day long. I worked with one girl that worked with me at PacSun, and then 4 or 5 awesome dudes. AWESOME DUDES. I’m still friends with all of the ones that didn’t move away.

My boss, Paul, was a weightlifter, huge dude. Nicest dude ever. Maybe intimidating, but completely non-threatening. We used to skate in the shop all the time. During the day, it was quiet, and as long as we tended to customers, we could do anything we wanted. This company paid us so much money. I think that it was something like $8/hr but we were bonus-ly commissioned. So, if we made goals, we would get a percentage of what we made over our goal. To date, I feel like I made more money there than I have still made. Plus, I was a fantastic salesman so I was killing goals.

Then it happened…the call. I had gone out the day before and gotten a new car and the next day I got a call from my boss saying that the CEO was closing all the stores in the States. Ugh. That was a quiet few hours. We all just sat around and were so sad that it had come to that. It was nothing that we did, it was just a “trial market” which destroyed competition. I don’t know what they were looking for. So that sucked. Then it was time for liquidation.

The company sent over a classic, good ol’ fashioned Texan named Tan. Tan was authentic, and actually not a bad guy. Under different circumstances, we all could have gotten along. Not the case, those, so as soon as our stock was gone, we were out of jobs. So it happened slowly, 10%, 15%, 20%, and then it all came down. The worst of the worst people of the world find your store and just see giant purple signs that have a percentage sign. Ugh, disgusting people. Dregs.

Then we all got apathetic. We didn’t care about customers, sales, everything. We began hiding things so that we could benefit from the inevitable 90% off deals. Hiding things on the top of shelves, behind other stuff, in the ceiling, and so on. Then we got destructive and awesome. We would stand at one side of the store and throw plastic hangers at the walls and they did shatter. Shatter into a million pieces. It was childish, but it was a fantastic way to let off some steam. One kid took the pole that we used to get clothes of tall racks and ran it through the wall of the dressing room and perforated the wall. No one cared. We actually “fixed” the wall with painters tape and wall putty. It looked terrible but we didn’t care.

Finally, it was down to two pair of pants, which I sold for seven cents to some girl walking down the hall just so we could all close up and go home. The moving guys came and took some of the random stuff back to the Canadian shops to use but we all took stuff like grip tape, hardware, bearings, wheels, and some random stuff. That was all legit, no stealing. They gave it to us. Then we closed the doors forever. Now it’s a candle store.

I still talk about how awesome it was with the kids that worked there and you might get a few comments on the happenings that I overlooked. Man, I miss that place.