When I worked at Microsoft I had a habit of figuring out my taxes just after all the forms came in… I would file my return right away if I was due a refund, or wait until the last moment if I owed money.

This year my taxes were more complicated than ever before… complex capital gains, carryover of prior year capitol loss, business loss, vehicle expenses for business, travel expenses, business use of home… I had a fat stack of papers to fill out, an insane number of receipts, and I was too cheap to spring for accounting software last year to make my life easier. I also had a pretty busy February and March.

So, in spite of the fact that I anticipated a huge refund this year, I put most of the work off until last Sunday night or so. Accordingly, I was working down to the wire. I probably have to file an amended return because I didn’t include every one of my little expenses. Not to mention my return probably looks suspicious because I have such a dramatic disparity between revenue and business expenses… some of that due to unfortunate inventory management mistakes last summer, and some due to the fact that some of last year’s sales aren’t reflected until they get paid this year.

I was one of the slackers at midnight tonight. I was suitably frazzled, and I am sure I made a few mistakes. I’ll try to figure it out again after making a dent in the litany of other tasks I am trying to catch up on…

A bit over a week ago my otherwise nifty Motorola MPX220 phone decided to stop charging… the battery seemed fine, but when I plugged in any of several charging devices, no power flowed into the device.

After struggling through what I thought was a long hold time, I got someone who had a hard time understanding how to spell simple words, even when I spelled them out multiple times. A scheduled pickup never materialized, and I called back late the next day, and they told me my address was not on file. I gave my information all over again, and the scheduled AM pickup also never happened.

I called a third time yesterday, waited on hold about 20 minutes after several abortive attempts at navigating irrelevant voice prompts, and they scheduled a same-day pickup at my office. Someone from FedEx did show up, this time with a completely blank waybill, and I had no idea what the address should have been. So she said she could come back the next day, but I figured I could drop the package off somewhere just as easily on my own.

When I called Motorola again, I waited on hold for 25 minutes once more, only to get transferred a recording with a barely audible pronunciation of the destination address. I tried to drop the filled-out waybill today at Kinko’s, but they refused to accept the package because there was no recipient account number on the waybill.

On the rare occasions when I’ve had to return something electronic for repairs or exchanges, the vendor almost always just sent their driver with a door tag, or gave me a link to a web page where I could print my own label. This odd exception has wasted more hours than I would have thought possible. I found the whole thing very frustrating.

I was about to unleash a fury on the unfortunate person who would answer my call today, but the wait time was only 2 minutes, this time and she was oddly disarming and suitably apologetic. She managed to confirm the pickup by telephone instead of the usual electronic method, and even gave me an account number to list on the waybill in case something went wrong.

I could have been more explosive… I was rehearsing empty threats of lawsuits in my mind before I called. Thank goodness an occasional customer sevice lackey has decent people skills. We might be reading about violent cases of Customer Service Rage.

All of the daytime customer service staff seemed to be located in India, and are apparently unaccustomed to US accents pronouncing things like letters and common street names. However, after 4 pm or so, it seems that the support staff are in some Latin American country, and although the staff speak with an accent the ones I’ve encountered so far seemed less confused by American English conventions.

I’m not philosophically opposed to outsourcing; it stretched our resource-constrained team far further than previously possible when I was at Microsoft. Telephone customer service is hard to do well even inside a company. But I wish companies would evaluate the cost in a more sophisticated fashion: What’s the cost of customer frustration with a company? What’s the cost of a bad experience? What are your corrective measures when your outsourced customer service ruins your customer relationships?

In my import business, my goal is to find things that are imported for a good reason: I want something if the product is made better where it’s from than anywhere else, or an has a distinctive style that can’t be readily duplicated, or it otherwise has a really compelling origin story. I think that outsourcing of technical services will ultimately have this approach, as well as the low-end brutal cost consciousness that’s the dominant reason for going to India, China and Russia right now. There are some really well-educated folks in Asia and Russia and some of them are bound to develop technologies or maybe even service methodologies that will be in demand on their own merits, rather than simply because they cost less. Burnout jobs in call centers that spend most of the time trying not to be helpful to customers in to avoid expensive bench time or better software design… is this really the best outsourcing model?

I have been living on borrowed laptop since the 29th or so, when I sent my laptop off for repairs. It finally came back today. I was off running errands in the morning so I had to pick it up from the FedEx distribution center down in South Seattle.

I scheduled a bunch of demos for the next couple of weeks, so I hope to clear some inventory. I don’t like being in the position I’m in now… having too much inventory, having no seasonal factors in my favor for buying… it’s frustrating. On the bright side, one of my customers indicated they had sold through more product over the last few weeks, so the sting will be a bit smaller.

Yesterday I had a meeting with a distributor to talk about a line of products I don’t think I can completely handle on my own. It’s will be using my own branding, so I can minimize the risk of someone else stealing my supplier, and of course I also would be selling some custom products that couldn’t just be duplicated. I need to explore a bit more. I learned a lot at the meeting, and got one option that might work out.k

In the evening, since it was First Thursday, I went to the Henry gallery with Jennifer and another couple of folks, where I saw a couple of nifty installation pieces. One of them, a three-screen video installation from Doug Aitken, called “Interiors,” must have taken some incredible editing skills… three simultaneous videos on three different screens with edits tightly syncronized, overlapped and with a complex sound design.

Alex Lieber’s mobiles were kind of clever… They seemed a little Ikea-inspired, but I might just be cynical.

While I was preparing to move office I got incredibly busy, and then one day my laptop decided not to start. So I sent it off for repairs on Tuesday. I expect it will be ready early next week.

I haven't gotten my desktop machine at the office fully functional yet, alas. The newly set up machine decided not to completely boot, and when I reinstalled Windows, the system freezes when I get the message "You need to activate Windows to log in. Do you want to activate windows?"

If the machine were only kind enough not to freeze and let me answer, I'd be happy to deal with it. In the meantime I'm borrowing my friend's laptop for a few minutes at a time.

It looks like one of my customers I've been waiting on for ages will finally pay their bill. That makes me happy, but I am still so cash-impaired that I'm probably going to have to take on some part-time work or a temp job in tech in order to sustain myself. I don't want to be in that position, but if it makes it possible for me to continue building my business it's a reasonable tradeoff.

I’ve been trying to make moving into my new commercial space a gradual process, but it turns out that even moving a load or two of things each day for the last week wasn’t fast enough to get everything over there in time for my intended Wednesday deadline.

I’ll probably get most of the remaining stuff, sans desk and printer, over there tonight. But my home is still a bit of a mess… I need to make it at least somewhat presentable by tomorrow, when a friend of a friend will start renting out my extra room.

Maybe by midnight I’ll get to the required vacuuming…

Last night I finally slept sometime after 6am, and managed to get out of bed about 5 hours later. The previous night I slept much earlier but didn’t get up until midday. Alternating between sleeplessness and oversleeping is not much fun.

I did demos at the Seattle Uwajimaya this weekend, but I’m afraid I got a late start both days. Beyond that, my charisma quotient seemed to be down a few notches below normal, and I was probably not infrequently speaking slightly incoherently.

Food isn’t going so well… I’m eating erratically. Sometimes snacking madly, and sometimes eating too little at normal mealtimes.

I had a pleasant meal tonight… an experimental pasta dish, using a yuzu miso cream sauce and some yu-tsai, something like nanohana (basically, some lightly bitter stalky greens with pretty little flowers) Actually it probably sounds completely insane, but this is not your usual fusion restaurant overkill; I just used the miso in service of salt, waking up the pasta with the fermented complexity of miso and hint of yuzu. Plus it was a good excuse to see what Saison Factory’s products can be used for… I have a bunch of fun stuff from Japan I got as samples and wanted to look at ways to use them to see if they might be serviceable in upscale food retailers in the US… I like the things I’ve tried in the shops in Japan… though it’s a hard call if it would work in a wholesale business model.

Tonight it seems like many of the contacts I met in Asia have started touching base by email. I guess that will accelerate over the next few days. I’m also trying to nail down some other things at the same time. My sanity is decreasing, though, as I worry about finances, time, and so on.

Except for necessary moments of sleep, my first two full days back were all business. Jetlag has caused me more trouble than usual… two nights ago I slept less than three hours, and last night I unintentionally slept more than 10. I think what I really need is to find a way to do all of my work from Asia, so I never have to come back and recover from the East-bound jetlag that usually overpowers me when I return home.

I met with various folks this week, mostly looking to the future, but occasionally dealing with things that should have been settled a few weeks back.

I’ve been trying to work with a few local folks to expand my business without taking on so much inventory risk. So this week, I had arranged a meeting with one of my existing customers and a local restaurant owner, with whom I’ve been discussing a range of healthy ready-to-eat meals. Initially she was only talking about offering her vegetarian meat alternatives as standalone items, just seasoned enough to be incorporated into other dishes. But there is a bit of a surplus of vendors of such things, so I had recommended going a step further and offering something more in the ready-to-eat category that could be comfortably reheated; this meeting involved presenting some of the intended line-up to a customer and obtaining some feedback.

The meeting went fine, though for various reasons I’m sure it would not be smart to publicly reveal, I’m inclined to prefer a different customer as the first outlet to place the foods.

Thursday I took the keys to an office and storage facility just north of my home. It’s not terribly expensive. On one hand, I am very worried about cashflow right now, but I have essentially run out of room at home so I also have little choice. It turns out I also have a friend of a friend who will be coming to the US and renting one of my rooms, so most of the financial sting will be taken out.

I’m hoping I can successfully clear out all of the stuff that should actually be in the office space in time for my flatmate to arrive.

Simultaneously I have to figure out a way to finish some business plan revisions and a proposal to one of my suppliers, who wants me to draft an additional business plan for a small retail project. Taking care of all of this, and sales and bookkeeping too, will be a pleasant source of stress for the next few weeks.

I ended up scheduling a little more time for this trip than necessary. I had anticipated seeing a more public venue in Japan where the dragon beard candy company was planning to sell their product, so that I could witness, and hopefully learn from, a Japanese-style product launch. Their retail partner apparently recently rescheduled the event, so unfortunately I won’t get a chance to see it.

However, changing my return flight would have been more expensive than taking advantage of the remaining time. My original plan was to go to Shiga prefecture to do some ceramics hunting, as it’s one of the major ceramics centers I still haven’t visited and a substantial influence on Mashiko ware. Shigaraki ware tends to be fairly rustic, like Mashiko-yaki, so I had hoped to see more. Unfortunately, scheduling the trip turned out to be more complicated than I had hoped, so Hiromi arranged for a quick trip to the western coast of Shizuoka prefecture’s Dogashima, a small island in Izu.

This area produces a lot of wasabi products, and some citrus fruits like dekopon and a local variety of mikan (mandarin orange); I would guess that daidai could be found somewhere nearby in the right time of year.

We stayed in a hot springs inn with an oceanfront rotenburo (outdoor bath). Because of the structural design all of the rooms also featured ocean views… essentially the hotel was built against a cliff.

On the way from Yokohama, initially clear skies gave way to clouds and unexpected stretches of heavy snow, and clear skies returned as we approached our destination. Izu was chillier than Tokyo had been in the morning, and gusty winds limited our outdoor adventures. As we reached the hotel, the winds rose to a level that made opening the car doors a fair challenge.

We tried to brave the weather and enjoy the rotenburo before sunset. The men’s hot springs baths were set roughly 15 meters from the water, but as the waves crashed against the walls below, a salty spray would occasionally reach my lips as I looked out into the water. Just as sunset approached, one of the kashi-kiri onsen rooms became available, which was just above the women’s rotenburo. Hiromi had reported that one of the women’s baths was constantly besieged by cold ocean water and remained mostly unused. As some of the stronger waves launched columns of seaweed onto the roof below us, I could imagine it wouldn’t have been very comfortable to be in the way of some of the heavier spray.

Dinner was the usual ryokan style extravagant presentation, though the house seemed a little heavy-handed with their katsuo-dashi, enough that even Hiromi took notice, though she gleefully consumed the various crustacea and bivalves she was presented.

I hadn’t met Hiromi’s parents before this trip, and my awkward Japanese made conversation a bit challenging, but everything was pleasant enough. We stopped at her home on the way to and from Izu, as she needed to handle arrangements with the car.

Monday night Hiromi and I found a pleasant little Korean restaurant located atop a small Korean deli/grocery. Though it probably cost about twice as much as it would in Korea, we ate a perfectly suitable meal of kimchi dubu jjigae, pa chijimi, and chap chae, accompanied by a small bottle of low-alcohol Korean-style nigori-zake (unfiltered sake), a plate of small vegetable side dishes, and followed by some yuja-cha and soo jeong gwa. It was roughly 6000 yen, which is quite modest for Japan, along the lines of an okonomiyaki restaurant.

Juggling my luggage on the return turned out to be a bigger problem than I had hoped. In spite of asking most companies I met with at FoodEx to send me samples by post, I still ended up with a few bottles of yuzu juice, sudachi juice, and various other samples, as well as a couple of items for personal consumption I bought at Izu. Worse, the pamphlets I accumulated took up an obscene amount of space, most of which I actually wanted to keep.

I don’t think I’ll get enough sleep on the airplane, so returning to Seattle time is likely to be as painful as usual, alas.

On the last day at FoodEx I followed up with a couple of companies I had some interest in, and then I made a few other discoveries.

I can’t say that there was one product I would absolutely have to have this time, but I found several that I’m quite interested in and I think I’ll try to work something out with a few of the companies I ran into.

Because it was the end of the show for me, I spent more time cruising the non-Asian booths, and I found a suitably gimmicky nightclub drink product from an Austrian company. The product comes in metal tubes, in either alcoholic “cocktails” or non-alcoholic “energy drinks.” The taste of the cranberry-flavored “Wodka” cocktail isn’t quite my style, but the overall concept seems very clever and suitable for clubs trying to get some sort of attention. I chatted in German with one of the company representatives for a little while, and realized how sloppy my German is these days.

Actually one thing I’m happy about is that I think I’ve found some items with reasonable shelf-life at modest costs which still have decent style and interesting origin stories. Some nice cookies from Malaysia, some nicely-packaged sauces from Thailand, and various other things that seem to have good market potential without steering too far from my company vision.

By 4:10 pm most exhibitors started packing everything and departing. I was surprised that the 4:30 finishing time really meant “no later than 4:30”. Of course the trains were completely insane for the next couple of hours… I sat in a pastry shop for about an hour and I still couldn’t get a seat on the train from Makuhari station.

For dinner Hiromi and I stopped at a restaurant I really enjoyed a few years ago called Yuuan in Nishi-Shinjuku. It was still good food, but not quite the transcendent experience I remember from last time I was there. We had a nice “white sesame oil” nabe with very soft tofu and various spring vegetables, a simple tomato appetizer, and a pumpkin croquette, and some mountain vegetable tempura. The last time I was there they had their own house-infused liqueurs but these were apparently absent this time.

I tried to compress seeing all of the Tokyo Hotel, Restaurant and Catering show into one day this year. It was quite similar to last year, but I did find some excellent suppliers of Japanese tableware for restaurant and gift markets… some very stylish bamboo tokkuri from a couple of makers, some nice contemporary nurimono (lacquerware), and some Singapore-made furnace glass tableware well suited for trendy Asian restaurants.

Nothing too exciting in the equipment arena this year; maybe I saw everything imaginable last year. The really cool “clean fryer” I saw last year was apparently absent and I didn’t see anything that was totally new to me, save a variation of the self-shaking wok which featured a corkscrew stirring mechanism.

One company showed off a nifty line of teas produced in China, containing hand-tied teas with flowers that “bloom” as the tea leaves expand; the product is nearing a launch in Japan. The teas are all about the drama of the flowers revealing themselves; the exhibition design had them presented in wine glasses or glass teapots. I’ll get some samples when their packaging design is ready to go next month. It seems like a clever concept, though I think they are targeting about a $2.50–3.00 retail price per bundle (essentially one pot), so that may be a very narrow market in the U.S. In Japan, they are targeting the bridal and banquet markets.

I’ve been facing a little bit of pain in my legs and back the last couple of days… when I left for Hong Kong I swapped out my worn-out custom orthotics for the standard ones in my usually comfy Ecco loafers, and I think my feet aren’t happy about the sudden change.

Tomorrow I think I’ll just spend the whole day at FoodEx, where I’d like to follow up on some things that I looked at previously.

One item that I received a small sample of turned out to be more interesting than I initially gave it credit for. It’s a wheat-free and soy-free “soy sauce” that tastes very similar to the real thing. It’s apparently meant to satisfy a particularly narrow range of folks allergic to wheat or soy proteins. It’s made with compressed sesame seeds, barley and salt instead of soy beans, wheat and salt. I used it in tonight’s dinner and it worked quite well; it had a pleasant taste, and was functionally equivalent to soy sauce as a seasoning. I should find out if the manufacturer is willing to export it. It wasn’t made by the usual soy sauce suspects (Kikkoman, Yamasa, etc.)