Why's it take longer than it used to? (Oct.'09)
This started out as a favor and turned into a hobby business. Originally I would pick the cylinders up at lunch, do them on my free time, and mail them back on my way home from work. That's why for a long time the standard quote was "same day", or "next day" turn around. Situations changed and I was no longer able to do that. So it became "3 days maximum." That gave way to "3 business days". But after spending way too many late nights at the work bench to be sure I kept my word, I'm down to "Around three business days." More often then not, it's less than three days. As I've said before, when this starts to become too much like work, I'll stop. Well the "worry" is often more trouble than the work itself. So no more doing them in the wee hours. No more forcing myself to do them when I really don't want to, or shouldn't. Neither of those things help the quality of the work, or my attitude towards the "business" in general. I started to dread doing them, it started to become more work (worry) than I wanted. So rather than stop all together I cut myself some slack. So on a rare occasion a cylinder may take a week, but I'm sure you'd agree it's better to make you wait a few extra days than to force myself to do the work half heartedly, half awake, or under the weather. Jan 2016 Well the website has been blank for over a year and a half now. I didn't like pulling the plug the way I did, but every other time I tried to quit, it would cause a panic and a rush of work, lots of pleading emails for me to just do a few more. So what I ended up doing was just shutting it off. I said I would stop doing them if it got to be too much, and it did. I'd extended my turn around time to two weeks. What would happen was the cylinders would come in and every night after work I'd look at it and think "Man, I don't really don't want to do that." So I wouldn't. Night after night until I couldn't put them off anymore. I just didn't want to do them anymore. That, combined with the aggravation and stress of it, I'd had enough. I've done a handful in the last few years, along with some chamfering jobs for friends, but that's it.