FYI, the R.C. felt that yesterday's last entry was confusing. Too many names, too many people, too many projects. All I can say is that if it was confusing to read about, imagine how confusing it was to actually try and deal with all of that in one day....

Anyhow. Today started better. If snoozing in bed for 30 minutes after my alarm went off, then having to scramble to make it to work on time, and dropping my phone in the process is "better." (Sadly? In Anne's World, this is actually "better.")

And then first hour of actual work went well. No one bothered me and I was able to sit here quietly and get some Real Work done.

And then Vela bothered me because I haven't gotten the 'NutNews stories loaded for the last two issues, so I dropped everything and did that which is fine because it's part of the process and I intended to get it all done anyhow.

And then I went back to my Real Job for a brief, enjoyable interval.

And then the Argonuts Afield, the nationwide locations, started up again.

To begin with, the Bowery Boys, a marketing collective located in a Major Metropolitan Area not unconnected with the Great Lakes region. They've become the bane of our existence. Our marketing collective structure is designed to allow 2-3 individual locations to share one metropolitan area. There are five of the Bowery Boys, and (as any sensible person might expect), we haven't been able to generate enough business to keep them all happy. The Bowery Metro campaign is performing better than any other collective campaign we're running, but it's not performing well enough to support five locations.

Gidget and I have tried, for the past three months and using various tactics, statistics, and sentences composed of very short words, to explain to everyone on the planet that, yes, Bowery Metro is large enough to sustain five locations if the business owners go out and sell or hire outside sales people to bring in business. And we have failed, for three months, to get this simple fact through anyone's head.

The latest solution? Put up six campaigns. One to cover all of them, and one specifically for each location. Which will result in them bidding against themselves for the same 15 leads they're getting now--running up the price but not producing additional business.

We explained this to Vela (using even shorter words) and her opinion is that we need to look like we tried everything, so just do it. If wasting hours of my time and hundreds of dollars of the Bowery Boys money is preferable, in everyone's opinion, to telling them they need to bring in some of their own business, then--fine. Fine. I don't care any more.

Some days, I feel like I'm just drowning in stupid.