Three Builders, One Catalogue
Day thirty-eight of ninety: I fired one catalogue builder and hired another before lunch, found a three billion naira spreadsheet error that was really ten million, and left three deadlines sitting on my own desk.
Day thirty-seven ended with me sending everything myself, a market post that only obeyed my phone, a campaign name still refusing to be born, a Japan trip that had become urgent in a way a holiday should never be, and five dispatches, including that one, sitting in my vetting queue waiting for me to be the bottleneck again. Monday did not come to play. Monday came with a spreadsheet I had already started arguing with at half past midnight.
Because yes, my day technically started the night before. I sat with the finance cleanup responses after midnight and found the kind of problem that makes you sit up straight. Same stock, same units, same list of products, valued at less than half in their file compared to mine. One of us is wrong by a lot, and abeg, it cannot be vibes. Add a mystery deduction nobody has explained, a receivable that has not moved in twenty months with no list of who even owes it, bank pages that are ledgers pretending to be reconciliations, and an opening balance with no paperwork behind it. I carried all of that into the 9 AM call like a lawyer with no sleep, and the call had a hard stop at ten because leadership alignment was waiting right behind it. No conclusion yet, just better questions, which at this point is progress I will take.
The leadership meetings then handed everybody homework, including me. Fifty makeup artists to be reviewed by end of day so outreach can finally start, inventory to be reconciled through Sunday, a manual upload test to find out why products are not publishing, refunds to stop waiting for company and just go. My own list from those notes is very on brand: finish the shopping bag design and send it to manufacturers, test the new lip liner samples today, follow the reviewed artists on the other platforms. Somewhere inside the same notes, a smaller argument finally ended. A student creator asked whether a product she was gifted counts as owning it. It does. Gifted counts. She starts, we stop debating, everybody moves. And the sales report review produced my favourite number of the day: a December cost figure that read as billions because somebody multiplied total quantity by total price. The real figure is a tiny fraction of that. One formula, three billion naira of imaginary wahala, corrected in one meeting.
Then the catalogue changed builders three times. Overnight I had decided the home catalogue would be built with one AI tool, no prices, full picture, every single circled pick from every supplier going in, no pre-cutting by anybody, I will do the cutting myself when I can see the whole thing. By morning I had fired that tool. Messing up, in my own words. We moved to the second tool, I confidently announced it cannot generate images, and then had to correct myself in the same morning: it can, through the design app connected to it. So the final route is builder number two designing the pages in the design app, mood images generated from my actual product photos, factory mood photo as backup if the generated scene starts lying. Packet one, Arrival, got built and rebuilt three times to match each announcement: fifteen items, nine pages, mailboxes and house numbers and outdoor lights, re-zipped every time the plan changed. Six sections for clients, twelve working packets for us, because apparently I have circled almost seven hundred items across all these suppliers. Seven hundred. I did that to myself.
In the middle of that, quality control caught me being human. The backup faucet list I was about to send still contained two square designs, the exact square designs I banned on Saturday with a whole law and everything. One square shower trim, one rectangular hand shower, sitting quietly in my own list. The corrected version removed both, twenty six families down to twenty four, with a new line at the top: round and curved only. I make the rules, I break the rules, I catch myself breaking the rules. At least the system works, even if the system is also me.
Content, meanwhile, did what content does on Mondays: it queued. Five new stories drafted, Lego starting as wooden toys, home inspections getting a standard in 1976, an elevator flipping which floor everybody wanted, a shea tree making you wait fifteen years for fruit, one fungus ending an island's coffee era. Two of them got flagged as reel worthy. A seller reel about repair lists not arriving as rumours. A founder reel about the forty minutes I spent organising my to-do list instead of doing the to-do list, which is so accurate it hurts. A term of the week card explaining export pricing in plain words. All drafted, all beautiful, all waiting on my approval, and the farm feed is still refusing the posting tool anyway, so that one may need my phone again like yesterday. My thumb has not forgotten.
The day closed the way it started, with things sitting on my desk that only I can move. October salary is approved by everyone except me, the final click is mine. A compliance add-on I decided to cancel renews tomorrow, the call is mine, support closes at eight tonight, and I still have no evidence I made it, because I wrote this instead. The Japan decision is also still mine: the hotel we wanted sold out everywhere overnight, the replacement has one room left and free cancellation, the visa window closes tomorrow and needs a confirmed hotel for every night, and nothing is booked yet. A holiday should not need project management, but here we are.
Still hanging: the finance delivery dates I held for that call, the name that is still unchosen in its third life, tomorrow's inventory and NAFDAC session now calendared for the morning, the women's event details still missing with tomorrow as the deadline after which I plan on a guess, and the five dispatches ahead of this one finally on the record. Day thirty-eight ends with the scoreboard reading: one builder fired, one builder hired and corrected, one packet built three times, one three billion naira error reduced to size, one gifted product counted as owned, two square designs caught in my own list, and three deadlines still looking at me. Monday was not restful either. Day thirty-eight of ninety.