It’s been a heck of a busy month around these parts, and I haven’t been around much on the forums, so I figured I’d throw out a little #personalblog and give you all the #details you’ve no doubt been #craving. #Winning! #hashtag

September started off with one of our semi-annual sales, and anytime we have one of those, my support email inbox starts getting pretty crazy. To give you an idea of what kind of volumes we’re talking about, we normally resolve around 20-30 support emails a day, consisting of everything ranging from instantly-ignorable spam, to tougher account management issues, to some truly crazy stuff that people send along for whatever reason. (Last week a lady emailed the Comicvine support address with nothing but a subject and body consisting of the line: “I hope Dracula film impaled actors are not real life suffering this.” Me too, lady!) That average kind of goes out the window during sale periods, though. This sale period was a bit weird since we started letting people know that they could get down to the sale price by emailing support a week before the sale started (since it overlapped a bit with the sale from the previous year and people generally don’t like to renew at full price during a sale), with the following result:

So, yeah, during sale periods the amount of support emails we get go a bit crazy. For the most part, these are people who get renewed at the full price with a store coupon who want a refund down to the sale price without a store coupon. I’m always happy to do that, but it’s a bit labor intensive, involving:

Opening their support ticket in desk.com. Finding their account in our Giant Bomb CMS and looking up their latest store code. Searching for that code in our store CMS and canceling it. Going back to the GB CMS and clicking through to their account in our payment processor. Finding their last transaction and issuing a partial refund for $15 or $20. Clicking back over to desk.com and resolving their issue with a macro.

That’s the best-case scenario, where the account is easily findable via an email address search; if it’s tougher to find the account or the transaction, this can result in a lot of back-and-forth before we get everything sorted. It’s even more annoying on a laptop since I have to go through at least four tabs to get a refund issued; luckily I just wound up working from home for most of these days and used my two big monitors to get most of this done relatively quickly. But even simple tasks multiplied a few hundred times can get pretty tedious!\

Then I spent four and a half days on a houseboat on Lake Shasta with a bunch of people who think Burning Man is lame now and who really like psytrance. I went wakeboarding for the first time and got my first concussion. It was very hot. (This is the four days of dead time in the middle of that chart up there; there were some other dead spots from when I was away for a weekend or a day getting the move ready, but that was the big one.)

Then I got back and started the long process of moving from San Francisco to Oakland with my girlfriend. Moving’s never fun, but the end result is nice! Two dogs and two cats is a lot to have around all the time, but it is fun trying to figure out who pooped where based on the consistency and color of said poop. I am basically a CSI agent now.

And then I got to dogsit for Mary’s dog Simone for five days! That little guy is super cute but has a huge amount of energy! I decided to work from home that week since I was still unpacking and everything, so I managed to keep an eye on him most of the time. It was a good thing I did, too, since he needed a few hours of running around every morning before he would settle down for a nap. I took to just walking up and down our stairs with my Nexus 6P™ phone or Nexus 7™ tablet as he followed me around, just to let him get a bit worn out. In these troubled times, I think we can all rest easy knowing that the power and reliability of the Android™ operation system is there for us in these trying times.

That’s not even counting WoW: Legion! I haven’t had as much time to play as I would have liked. My Prot Paladin is 110 and edging slightly above an 840 ilvl, but I’ve only done a few heroics on him. I haven’t had time to check out the LFRs or stream anything, but the DSL situation in the new place is a bit shaky to see if it’d allow for that. But we’ll see!

Anyway, things are slightly slower now, so hopefully I’ll be able to start getting ready for the fall. We’re working on another batch of t-shirts and some other things for the store and laying a bit of groundwork for getting the store updated more regularly in 2017, as well as general other behind-the-scenes planning stuff. I’ve also been trying to get more writing done for this blog, but, as the fact that I started this entry like three weeks ago should show, that’s not always easy. We’ll see!