News
Boredwalk Community: Aliens in Egypt
1. What's your actual day job and what's your dream day job?
My day job is I teach math and science to 6th graders. My dream job would be to be a writer. But I never seem to finish what I start! (Ed. note: I feel this. My sketch pads and hard drives are veritable graveyards of incomplete designs. *sigh*)
2. If you could have any super power what would it be and why?
I think teleportation would be pretty epic. You could go anywhere you wanted. I would travel every damn where. (This would come in especially handy during Covid-pocalypse.)
3. You can curse your nemesis with a minor annoyance for eternity; what do you choose?
I’m not a terribly vindictive person but a low grade headache would be a bitch for sure.
4. What experience do you most want to cross off your bucket list?
Seeing the pyramids in Egypt. What an amazing feat those aliens accomplished.
5. Clear up a misconception (about your job, where you are from, some other topic you know a lot about).
I think there is this idea that teachers (elementary school teachers especially) should be role models in both their public and private life. Who I am to my kids is entirely different than who I am at home or with my friends. If I wanna dress sexy I should be allowed to do so without fear that I’ll get fired because my friend with public social media posted a drunk picture of me. Teachers are just people. We mess up just like everyone else and often get fired because of it (because think of the children!) Listen, your kid watches Deadpool. Me showing some cleavage isn’t that big of a deal. Chill.
6. Where can the rest of the Boredwalk community find you?
I’m @rouge_nerd on Instagram. I keep my profile private because well, think of the children! 🤣
Boredwalk Community: Swearing & Tattoos
1. What's your actual day job and what's your dream day job?
I work in construction, which answers both questions! More on that below...
2. Clear up a misconception (about your job, where you are from, some other topic you know a lot about).
Construction has a lot of misconceptions, most of which are not true (for one thing, it actually pays very well).
Every construction site brings new, interesting challenges. When a project is finished, you can look back and see that you built something new, something that didn’t exist before,
something that will be there, in many cases, for generations to come. You get to build the stuff people depend on.
Also, there are not too many other industries where I can swear as much as I want and have tattoos. (Ed. note: Same here at Boredwalk! We always have to ask during interviews if applicants are at all uncomfortable with salty language...because there's a lot of it flying around the office & warehouse.)
3. What's a surprising fact about you?
Every day, I continue to be grateful and surprised by the fact that I was able to escape a life of poverty (I grew up on a struggling dairy farm in northern rural Minnesota). The fact that I am now living the life I have feels like I won the lotto. (This is awesome, and a wonderful reminder for us all to keep striving!)
4. Where can the rest of the Boredwalk community find you?
Not really a public person. But you can find the company I work for here:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/saybr-contractors-inc/
Boredwalk and This Week's Protests
(This is our second post on this topic, please read the first one for context.)
This week we have decided not to create any organic posts on our Facebook and Instagram accounts, so attention can be focused on the protests. We have received several comments from people today who also want us to "pause" or "cancel" our Facebook/Instagram ads. I am certain none of those people work in our industry, because comments like that reveal a total lack of understanding of how these ads work.
You cannot really "pause" ads on Facebook or Instagram; ads can be off or on. And if you turn off ads, you can't just turn them back on at the same budget later — you'd have to restart them as if they are new ads. The platform places restrictions on starting budgets, so turning off ads for any length of time would require us to reset our whole ad budget and would limit our ability to spend on ads. It would also reset the algorithm's "learning" which is what it uses to put the ads in front of the right audience so we can run a functioning business. When you launch a new ad on these platforms it doesn't necessarily behave profitably right away; in fact, it could (and probably would) lose a lot of money for several days before it figures out how to run profitably. You have to run ads over time usually to get them to be consistently profitable. If we turned all the ads off today they'd have to go back to square one when we eventually restarted them, thus crippling our business for the foreseeable future.
Resetting all of the ads would cause a drastic drop in our sales that would take more than a day or two to recover from. We, along with our staff, depend on those sales for our livelihood (along with our vendors). We are a small artist-owned business, not a huge rich corporation. We are not in any better position to do without income for days or weeks than you are.
Willfully damaging our company's ability to support us and our team in an already battered economy with high unemployment would be reckless and not productive. It would also put us out of compliance with loans we've accepted, which could carry pretty severe legal penalties. In borrowing funds to get our business through the pandemic we were required to attest to being good stewards of our business. Taking actions to drastically harm income isn't being good stewards of the business.
On the other hand, being able to continue to run ads and make money puts us in a position to have funds to make more donations to organizations that are actually able to be productive and helpful. While I understand that turning everything off might seem like a show of solidarity, it's a PR move that changes nothing and only adds to the economic damage we've already suffered. The real show of solidarity comes with running an ethical business with a commitment to living wages and putting our money where our mouth is and supporting social justice organizations that advance the cause. We were doing those things before the current protests became news, and we will continue to do those things long after it fades from headlines.
Anyone who has a better idea of how to still run a profitable business, pay our employees more, AND be a more socially conscious business should apply to work here. We're hiring this summer. If you have better ideas than us and more substantial experience than us in achieving the goals you think we are failing to achieve, please come show us how to do it better! I'm not being flippant. We are hiring for a general manager later this summer, and if you think you can do the job better than we are doing it please do apply for the position.
We are looking for candidates with substantial experience in the e-commerce space, so having ideas without a proven track record isn't really going to be enough to get hired for this role, but if you have a proven track record of managing profitable e-commerce businesses that deliver good wages and social responsibility we'd love to hear from you.