Not an enormous amount to write about this week, but I figure I’d better get another editorial up there, before any more Southern customers stumble across the last one. 🙂 It has to be said, they were actually very nice, but I’m still a little nervous about the strange crossover between the bead-buying public and visitors to this site – which will probably only increase next week when we finally launch…ooh, in red, I think…www.trashcity.org. It’s up and running already, actually – feel free to visit. Next week, tumbleweeds will roll across this site, save for an automatic redirection until my Demon subscription runs out. Whenever that is.

Rather large lottery jackpot here this week: a mere $295 million, the result of multiple rollovers (it’s harder to hit the jackpot here since, while you still have to pick six numbers, you have to nominate one as the Powerball) and some seriously frantic buying in the past week. Only 20 states take part, so those living elsewhere have to badger relatives or drive over the border to their nearest convenient location. It puts things into perspective, however, that if you drive ten miles to buy a ticket, you are sixteen times more likely to die on the trip than to win the jackpot.

You don’t actually get $295 million either: if you want a lump sum, you’d receive about half that, otherwise the jackpot is paid over 25 years (a bit of a con given that inflation would be steadily chewing into it), and in both cases, you have to pay tax on your winnings. Still, even in a worst case scenario, that’s a tasty chunk of change, maybe $60-70 million and it’s difficult enough to get your mind round that sort of money.

With an unerring knack, the people who win always seem to be thoroughly undeserving – the elderly (who inevitably dole it out among their equally undeserving children), or even a convicted armed robber in this case, though on the plus side, I guess the chances of him reoffending have probably all but evaporated. The worst kind are those who say, “It won’t change me. I’m still going to keep on working.” What is that nonsense? Of course it’ll change you, and the first thing I would do would be to replace the entire Trash City site (business division) with a “CLOSED FOREVER” logo. Anyone who wants to keep on working when they no longer need to, is showing a total lack of imagination.

I firmly look forward to the day when we can kick back and let our children take care of us. To this end, Emily was auditioned by a model agency (that’s basically a pimp with a receptionist) a couple of days ago. Sitting in the foyer, watching all the beautiful, high-cheekbones, totally vacuous people drifting in and out, I couldn’t help wishing I hadn’t succumbed to the heady delights of the Mexican dessert known as Xango – prononunced ‘Django’, and about as deadly. I comforted myself with the fact that I was not on heroin. Anyway, Emily now moves on to the second stage, where she has to go to classes to learn all the essential skills necessary for being a model/actress/whatever. Whether bulimia is part of the course, only time will tell.

And with that, it’s off to double update, to Demon and trashcity.org. Thanks to Demon for a largely painless service, and here’s to Trash City, the next generation!

Customer service has never really been my strong suit. “Does not play well with others”, would have been the sort of phrase you’d have seen on my annual performance appraisal. But it’s a skill which I am having to acquire these days, as the commercial arm of Trash City (the bead and jewellery supply side – the bit that finances all the DVDs, trips to odd conventions, etc.) has gone utterly berserk over the past couple of weeks.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that this near-doubling in sales volume coincides with the end of the school holidays. I think that once people get their kids packed back off into academia, they can return to gentle pastimes involving crimps, rondelles and other things which this time last year were purely trade jargon to me. Now, while I can perhaps not quite distinguish between Picture Jasper and Picasso Marble, I can identify most US states by their zip-codes, and tell a valid credit card from a dodgy one purely by the sound the terminal makes.

With experience, my telephone manner has certainly improved, even if the phenomenal level of unsolicited sales calls here is something I’m coming to terms with. In Britain, they were a sporadic occurrence, and almost a novelty. In Phoenix, the average day will have half a dozen cold calls, or attempts to send a fax through a voice line, offering us everything from mobile phones to business websites – and I take a pitch for the latter as a personal insult. My favourite approach is “Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later”; funnily enough, this usually seems to do the trick.

Fortunately, Chris has been here to help handle the trickier actual customers – largely those from South of the Mason-Dixon line. My basic rule of thumb is, if their state ends in a vowel – Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky being the main offenders (I adopt a relaxed attitude to vowels, please note) – she gets to talk to them, just as soon as she notices my frantically flailing arms and steadily increasing volume OF SPEECH. I’m sure they’re very nice people, it’s just that every time I hear them speak, I imagine I can hear banjos duelling in the background.

It doesn’t help that certain customers seem unaware of the time-zone differences here in the States. Just now, the East coast is three hours ahead of us, which means a brisk 9am call to them is ringing the bell here at 6am. And to someone like myself, who has a questionable approach to customer service at the best of times…well, let’s just say that 6am definitely does not count as said best.

This may partly explain the communication difficulties, with a large percentage of the conversations consisting, on both sides, of “What did you say?”, “Sorry?” and “Could you repeat that again?” Two countries, divided by a common language – and a couple of weird accents as well. Indeed, accents have a terrible habit of rubbing off on me; after the weekly phone-call home to my parents in Scotland, I unconsciously pick up on their speech patters, to the great amusement of the family here. I fondly hope that somewhere down in the Deep South, a customer who has just placed an order for beads with us is now unintelligible to her friends, as she now talks, at least temporarily, of “lifts”, “pavements” and “petrol”.

“So this is it, I’m going to die.” In my 35 years on this planet, that isn’t a thought which has crossed my mind very often. Thus, while perhaps not something I’d like to do every day, I suppose it was refreshing to find myself contemplating the prospect of my imminent demise. On the whole, I’d rather do so tucked up in bed, than sat just behind a Joe Don Baker lookalike, piloting a neo-microlight aircraft above the Grand Canyon, with a fuel gauge which appeared to have hit zero several chasms ago.

Can’t say my entire life flashed before me, but the bits which had caused me to be in my current predicament, certainly did. We were accompanying friend Andy, who was visiting us as part of his first trip to the States. With limited time, we’d opted to take him to Las Vegas and then fly out to see the Grand Canyon, so booked a day tour there which included a flight there and back as well as a coach once we’d got there.

The first sense of unease was climbing aboard the courtesy bus to North Las Vegas Airport. We were the only non-Japanese speaking participants, and I feared Godzilla was going to swoop down and use the bus as a toothpick. This feeling of alienation increased at the tour terminal with a mainly Japanese staff and announcements given first in Japanese, then (somewhat grudgingly) in English. My neck hairs really began to do the lambada when the few Westerners were syphoned off to our own plane: I wondered if the Japanese annoucement went something like, “Honoured travellers from our homeland, please wait in the lounge, while we dispose of the Yanqui Mothra-flickers – at last, revenge for Hiroshima! Banzai!” Or perhaps it was an elaborate plot conceived by my Japanese psycho-ex girlfriend, now sniggering quietly from behind the smoked glass?

“Who wants to sit beside me?” were virtually the first words out of our pilot’s mouth – Chris’s hand shot up, a decision she was later to regret, and we climbed aboard the ten-seat Piper plane. There’d be no duty-free catalog here, nor stewardesses, and the safety demonstration was perfunctory, though opening the emergency doors seemed to require eight different operations simultaneously, and thus might have been tricky for non-cephalopods. I made a mental note never to fly on any craft without drop-down oxygen masks again, providing I survived this ordeal. But where had I seen the pilot before?

Take-off was smooth enough – it was the moment we left the ground that the interesting bit started. I’m used to planes going up and down, but being in one which falls sideways was a whole new dimension (literally). Air-conditioning was limited to a nozzle, carefully positioned so that the breeze went 0.5 inches in front of your nose, and Andy (more used to the heat of Lancashire than Arizona), was soon pouring cold water over himself. Chris, in the co-pilot’s seat, was unable to move a muscle, for fear of nudging the duplicate controls and sending the plane plummeting. And I was unable to appreciate the wonderful scenery outside (and quite a bit down) because my eyes were fixed on the fuel gauge, which had gone from full to 3/4 empty in about twenty minutes. Willing it to stop, and trying to understand my recognition of our pilot, was better than browsing any in-flight movie.

As the gusts buffeted us around like a cat playing with its prey, and the fuel needle began to wrap itself around ‘E’, I prepared for a crash landing, and looked down to see if there were any flat, unforested areas that even remotely resembled a runway. Hello! This is the Grand Canyon: we don’t do flat and unforested! And then I remembered where I’d seen the pilot. Four years ago, on my first trip to the place, I’d taken a bus tour. I am prepared to swear blind that the man who drove the bus on that occasion, was now the one perched at the controls of our flying coffin. At the risk of repeating myself: “So this is it, I’m going to die.”

Then, just as I was about to bring to the pilot’s attention, the little matter of our imminent fuel shortage, he flicked a switch, and I learned something that will always be engraved on my brain, in letters of stone. Light aircraft have two fuel tanks. The needle swung back to ‘F’, and I immediately revoked all those frantic promises to God that I’d been making, particularly the one about masturbation.

At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, we landed safely, if a little more laterally than I’d have liked (re-enacting an old joke about the airport announcement: “the plane now arriving at gates 5, 6, 7 and 8…is coming in sideways”). But after that traumatic journey, the Grand Canyon seemed a little larger, deeper and more life-affirming than ever before. Particularly, for some reason, watching the Japanese tourists cavorting precariously on its edge…