(Early in our setup)
Thanks to everyone who came to see us at Salute, and of course to everyone bought some of our lovely wares!
We always appreciate seeing our happy customer's faces and even if I (or anyone else) had to rush off during a quick chat, we still appreciated the effort :D
Right, I promised on facebook that there were anectdotes, and 'oh boy' are there anectdotes :)
Everythign was going reasonably smoothly until Thursday midday when we arrived to pick up our hire van. We had helped waiting to help us load the van (and particularly play jenga with the newly increased stock we have this year). The van shows up, looks fine.
I notice some black stains below the back door, open it and the inside of the van is covered in motor oil. And I don't man someone spilled some, I mean it was all over the walls, pouring around the floor and had mixed in broken glass. Unsurprisingly I informed them politely that it as unsuitabl for use.
Thsi meant it had to go be cleaned, as there were no other vans fo the size needed available. This cost us all of our packing day 'and' our packing help. At 8pm, after a long day, three of us instead of five started packing the van. At 11pm I made an execuive decision that the 'jenga' part wasn't possible without us all getting hernias and being up past midnight so we left some stands in the unit. We figured our customers would be understanding (They were, thank you everyone).
This also meant we missed out hotel stop Thursday night and had to leave from Wales very early Friday morning.
Again, all goes well, for about 30 minutes, then the van breaks down. There followed a very nailbiting hour, and an even more nailbiting 15 minutes while the AA guy told us we'd need to swap the van and shouldn't drive it. We explained the situation, and opened theback door to poitn at the ton of metal in there, and he decided to help us out and work some magic on the side of the road. (If you are out there AA guy then we thank you).
However, all of this now meant we also missed half of the unpacking time on Friday at the Excel!
I shall be having an interesting conversation with the manager of said van hire company tomorrow. He may not find it that interesting.
Despite all of this, our cabal of HF helpers gave a sterling effort, pulled it all together and we were able to run a successful show day!
Thank you very much to Wyn, Neil, Dave, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt (sorry I lost count of the Matts), Richard, Kieran and Meg.
Me, Jenn, Sal and Kevv all appreciate your effort on the day :)
Ok, I'm going to bed, see you in May ;)
'til next time,
Arty
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