East Coast Telemarketing and West Coast Tribulations

Today began with a 4:30am phone call from an East Coast telemarketer, and pretty much followed along in that same general fashion.

Highlights included taking a phone order for Cyclocross.com, despite never having seen the console for that before, let alone having been trained to use it. Luckily, resident programming guru and wind-beneath-our-ecomm-wings, Jay, tends to build some eerily effective user interfaces.

Upsides included selling our first frameset and complete bike today. Downsides included a glitch–entirely my fault, but multi-faceted nevertheless–that caused us to sell something well below cost. Not too much, in the grand scheme of things, though, and quite the teaching moment.

Meanwhile, responses continue to come in for the ‘cross frame design. Some BB30 people out there, but I’m wondering if you’re die-hard BB30 or just haven’t bothered distinguishing between BB30 and PF30. I was learning towards PF30 for a bunch of reasons–not least of which being the ability to drop in an eccentric for single-speed use–but is there some reason to avoid PF30?

One 386EVO bottom-bracket request on a steel frame. Now that’s something you might not even see at the Handbuilt show, right there. Sort of curious what it would look like.

Pretty amped about creating some stuff, though. After four months with like a quarter inch of rainfall here in Portland, a part of me is ready for this dreaded, dark and wet winter, so I can put the mad scientist hat back on and get to work.

Though I guess I’d still be commuting to work in that weather, so nevermind. Carry on, sunshine.

Danzig’s on the mind again tonight. Specifically, thinking about elevated chainstays. Too flexy? Too weird-looking? Too 1987? I’ve always had a thing for the original Santa Cruz Hecklers (later to be known as Superlights) and their elevated stays. Some aspects of Danzig’s design would really lend themselves to an elevated drive-side stay, I think.

But that might just be too bizarre. I might have to draw that up to try to get a visual before heading to Interbike, which is (holy crap) next week.