The Winds of Change . . .

I am a creature of habit – and not a fan of change in my life (trust me, my parents are reading this and nodding their heads).  I start my morning with my newspaper – every morning.  When I am home, I eat the same thing for breakfast – every morning.  You get the idea.  So when something I have done the same way for many years changes, there is an adjustment period.

We have new credit card machines in our booth – for the first time in nearly 15 years.  I know – it’s not a big deal.  But I found myself stumbling a bit in using them, so last night I decided to figure out why . . .

 

New machine on the left – old machine on the right.  The numbers are reversed – the 0, 4, 5, & 6 are in the same places, but 1-2-3 and 7-8-9 are on different rows.  And the card swipes with the stripe facing left instead of right.  So that explains it, and I’ll master it eventually.

There are advantages – we can now take debit cards in the booth (and just hand the machine to the customer to key in her PIN), and when the newfangled EVM chip cards become mandatory in the fall, we’ll be able to take those, too.

Some changes don’t bother me as much.  The booth layout in the Better Living Center at the Eastern States Exposition was different this year – the booths were more toward the middle of the building and the aisles were longer and wider.  I noticed it right away (the promoter told me that he wondered if anyone would) – and all day on Saturday customers asked me if the show was smaller this year (it isn’t).  There was also something different on the way into the parking lot . . .

There are message boards all over the place.  But there were enough familiar sights in our booth during the day to keep me from panicking . . .

 

Donna Bedard took time out from her job with the USPS to run a cash register for us, Mary Garvey helped customers in the booth (complete with a ladybug purse), and Susan LeClerc was wowing customers at the demo table with Wink of Stella and Chameleon Pen demos.

This is a familiar sight, too – I tried to snap a quick shot of the crowd in the booth early in the day, and got it out of focus.

T-shirt of the day – “When in doubt, just add glitter . . .”

And the best sight of the day – Lucie and Nicole (Luni Stamps) took time out from their busy retirement to come south of the border and visit with their friends from the show circuit.  I hadn’t seen them since last August at Stampaway in Cincinnati – their last show before they rode off into the sunset.