A good day despite this layer of dust that now covers me. And I forgot, once again, to take a photo of my booth.
I discovered one of the challenges of using a portable credit card processing mechanism (Square in my case, which has made my life as a traveling art seller much easier, most of the time): When there’s not good cell reception (AT&T — what gives? What happened to Anytime, Anywhere?) and little to no available public broadband access, it becomes near-impossible to process credit cards. I found myself walking laps, holding my cell phone (which is what I process cards from) in the sky, casting spells, begging and pleading, just to get a signal.. Although I did manage to process every card presented to me (at almost every show, 50 – 75% of sales are via credit card), it took up to 5 minutes to get the thing to go through. It kept “timing out” and I even managed to somehow delete two sales off the thing after it “timed out” while trying to process the signature after the people who purchased items had already left.. Oh well.. you live, you lose, you learn. I’m just not sure what I learned yet– I haven’t figured out a solution to process credit cards when there is inadequate network access.
Anyway, a word of caution to Square using vendors. One more day full day of the River Festival, and then I’ll be on my way back home.