Epic Fail or Epic Win ~ One Decade Later
*This is a reprise of five posts I did that started back in October 2013. The entire debacle is celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this week, and in retrospect, it changed me in more ways than I care to admit. I feel like a completely different person!
Loves, we all have our shit, and sometimes that shit can roll you into the gutter and redirect you because you’re too dense to get the hint(s), and in the process facilitate a huge life change. I got both rolled and redirected so…yeah.
I’ve formatted them back to back to be able to read them all at the same time. It’s longer than usual, but hey, it’s the weekend.
Carry on! xox
Epic Fail or Epic Win?
I owned a business in Studio City, California.
It was several years ago now.
I left a good job that I had been at for close to 20 yrs.
I put all my proverbial eggs in that one basket.
My money, my creative juices, my blood, sweat, and tears.
I was excited at the prospect of being my own boss, of displaying my wild ideas for all the world to see,
using the skills I had acquired throughout my life.
I felt vulnerable, really vulnerable for the first time ever because I was putting myself out there in the arena, on the big stage, with no excuses.
This store would be a reflection of me, curated by moi, everything I loved, cared about, and thought was cool.
This was it! I was 50 and this was the beginning of my beautiful “second act”.
The first year was awesome!
It was tons of hard work with no days off, but I was okay with that.
This was my baby.
It needed me to nurture it, to make it my only focus, and all was well.
The following year was 2008.
Things got dicey.
There was a feeling of dread in the air like everyone was silently holding their breath waiting for the shoe to drop.
Money slowed waaaaaay down.
Then it was 2009 and the entire closet of shoes dropped and it was loud!
The bottom seemed to fall out of everything.
People were scared. Fear reigned supreme.
I did my best to stay out of the fray, knowing that the fray is never where you want to find yourself. People who had money would still stop by and shop, but when they did they confided that even they didn’t want to be seen walking out with bags of new purchases.
Shopping Shame. It was like nothing I’d ever seen in all my years in retail.
Everything that was creative and wonderful and fun was gone.
Replaced by unpaid bills, days of not a single customer, and sleepless nights with me wondering how I got myself into this! How had I taken such an abundant, wonderful life and created this perfect shit storm?
Then in September of that year, God, in her infinite wisdom (and because she was tired of hearing me complain) took pity on me.
But as we all know, God has a wicked sense of humor and a flair for the dramatic.
She sent a flood. And not just any flood. A biblically rare and random urban flood that snuck up in the middle of the night and wiped out my store.
Bible. I’m serious.
One of the firemen at the scene told me he’d never seen water make a hard right turn. But it did, and it all collected around and inside my sweet little store.
The one that was trying so hard but just couldn’t stay afloat (see what I did there?).
This was the first time I asked myself the question:
Epic fail? Or epic win?
What do you think so far?
(To be continued)…
Epic Fail or Epic Win Part II
Sometimes we have no idea what the Universe has in store for us.
We can have our sails aimed into the wind, sailing full speed ahead, when in an instant, lightning will strike, and a giant rogue wave will capsize us and shred our boat to smithereens.
We think we have it all figured out. Right? I KNOW I did!
But life took me by the shoulders and spun me around, just like a mother does to a kid with a chocolate smeared face who lies and says she washed it.
It shook me like an Etch-a-Sketch and sent me packing….in the exact opposite direction of where I thought I should be going.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I can tolerate, even appreciate, a little course correction at times.
But I don’t like drama, and I like to think I don’t draw it in.
Now, this. This was something so ridiculously out of left-field—the total loss of my business. Overnight.
I had plenty of insurance, so I wasn’t worried… at the beginning.
With the other stores having only twelve inches of water damage and mine under four feet of slime and muck, recovery mode looked different for me.
It wasn’t clothes and shoes that had gotten wet, or the cosmetic damage the restaurants sustained.
I had one-of-a-kind furniture and original art, art glass lamps and perfectly aged leather chairs, you know, stuff that shouldn’t marinate in four feet of filthy water for six hours.
I heard everyone saying: “at least three weeks to get back up and running.”
That seemed like a long time to be closed up.
I began to ask myself: Did I even want to get back up and running? Things really hadn’t felt like they were running at that point— more like a pathetic commando crawl.
Was it a possibility? Would I even be able to repair the inventory?
Lord knows I didn’t have the capital to buy more.
That’s when the first of two miracles occurred.
Surprisingly, I even knew when they were happening that they were miracles, that’s how in my face they were.
(To be continued)…
Epic Fail or Epic Win (Miracle I)
Webster’s dictionary defines a miracle as:
“A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”
I’ll agree with that.
A miracle also makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and your heart beat faster than is survivable.
Or at least it does that to me.
The first miracle occurred not too long after I arrived at my store to find it ankle-deep in a slimy, sludgy, mud, which was the lovely parting gift the flood had left me.
I was walking around in circles with my mouth ajar. I mean I was professionally assessing the damage.
Like the people on the evening news say when something awful has just happened, you really do go numb and it is beyond your comprehension to believe it is happening to YOU.
The file cabinet behind my desk had filled with water, so I was busy peeling apart my insurance papers to find the number to call, to get the adjuster out quickly.
It was 6:30am the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. Good luck with that!
When I finally did reach him, he informed me that he was away for the weekend and would get back to me Tuesday. Like my toilet had overflowed or something.
I told him to turn on the news so he could see me flipping him off on LIVE TV. Crews from every channel were crawling all over the place, waiting to get in. The fire department had caution taped the shit out of the entire block, and they were doing some cleanup on the street, so we had to prove we were the business owners to even be allowed near the place.
I was inside for about 30 minutes fumbling behind my desk like an addled nit-wit, when a scruffy, middle-aged man walked into the store and started looking around, shaking his head and making a tisking sound.
I was on my phone looking for a flood cleanup company, and when I asked him what he was doing, he ignored me, continuing to walk around tisking, with his hands on his hips. That’s when I asked him nicely to “get the hell out”.
As he left he mumbled something under his breath like “Your insurance is never going to understand and pay you for your this stuff, it’s too esoteric”. My husband, who had fallen into a coma and I both did a cartoon worthy double-take and yelled, “Hey, what did you say?” in unison, like some kind of vaudeville act.
He explained as I took notes. “They’ll deny the claim because flooding is subjective,” he said, “And even if they don’t, they won’t pay replacement cost. Pennies on the dollar…maybe.” Looking at the ground, he pulled something out of the mud with the tip of his shoe, shook his head and told us we were in for a long fight. As he left, almost as an afterthought, he recommended that I call a Public Adjuster. “They’ll take over everything and deal with the insurance company. For a fee of course.”
Wait. What?! I’m starting to feel panicky.
I’d never even heard of such a person so I ask him for a recommendation. He used a certain company during his own personal calamity and gave me the name, but he said there were several, and that I should call a few.
Writing furiously on some wet muddy paper, I looked up to thank him but he was gone.
I immediately ran outside but he’d simply vanished. When I described him to the firemen they had no idea who I was talking about, nobody fitting that description had crossed their security line. As a matter of fact, several friends who’d come to get a load of what had happened had to call my cell so I could get them past the security line, yet somehow this guy had found his way in and given me the information I needed.
Back inside, I eeny, meeny, miny, moe’d my way through the companies and picked one out of the three names I found.
Gary arrived in an hour, fired the cleanup crew that was walking around clueless and overwhelmed, hired some pros that specialized in art and antiques, and had the whole thing under control by noon. He was professional and comforting and knew exactly what to do. I would have paid him a million dollars at that point so ten percent sounded like a bargain.
For the first time that day I took a deep breath and started to cry.
Oh, and my scruffy, middle-aged angel? He was exactly right! When the insurance adjuster finally showed up on WEDNESDAY!!….he denied the claim. He said “flooding” was open to interpretation, and I probably wasn’t covered anyway (I was).
But that was okay, I had Gary, and we were in for a long fight.
(To be continued)
Epic Fail or Epic Win , Miracle II
The second miracle occurred during cleanup.
We were about four days in.
The mud had been squeegeed away, but the floors, walls, windows, and merchandise were still covered with a layer of smelly slime.
We covered our faces with hot cloth masks and plugged ahead.
Oh yeah, did I mention it was over 100 degrees?
This was the day I was told that the walls of the building had to be cut wide open up to 5 feet in order to air them out and avoid the dreaded black mold. That hit me so hard, I can’t explain why, but it did. I went outside and sat on some hard concrete steps across the parking lot and cried while I watched the reciprocating saw carve up my beautiful little store.
This felt serious…and sad.
Gary came outside and put his arm around me as we sat silently watching the carnage. When he finally did say something, he asked me if I wanted to go in and box up the things in the bathroom storage closets that hadn’t gotten wet.
Since the walls would be wide open, someone could potentially get inside and help themselves to whatever was left behind, so he suggested I go take a look. I think he also just wanted to keep me busy, so he didn’t have to look at my big, sad, soggy face.
Without electricity, the bathroom was pitch dark as I poked around in the back closets with a box and a garbage bag, waiting for my eyes to adjust. It felt weird to me to be salvaging Windex, paper towels, and toilet cleaner, and I thought of just leaving it for the salvage crew or any would-be looter. Totally numb, I was going through the motions, trying not to cry, when I reached for a box of Tampons with the top torn off that was tucked in the back of an upper shelf. All my good customers knew it was there, and I would occasionally bring a handful from home to refill it. To men, this is a mystery, but all the women reading this know what I’m talking about. There were several left in the box, so I shoved them into my pocket and tossed the empty box in the trash. But it wasn’t empty…something heavy slid around the bottom of the box as it hurtled toward the heavy-duty garbage bag. I reached inside and pulled out the expensive watch my husband had given me for our fifth anniversary.
I stood there in the dark, the hair on my arms, legs, neck, and toes standing at attention as I started to shake violently and scream.
That watch had been “missing” for about 2 years.
My husband had just recently mentioned how disappointed he was that I hadn’t yet found it. We both knew I wasn’t someone who lost my jewelry. In my previous life as a jeweler, I had worn the watch a lot, but since opening the store, it seemed too fancy so I only took it out of the safe for special occasions. I NEVER wore it to the store.
One day I had gone into the safe to get it—and it was gone.
Did I mention I found the watch on September 9th?
Our anniversary is September 9th.
The missing watch had mysteriously appeared after 2 years on a sad but significant day in an impossible place.
It was a sign. Don’t lose hope. Miracles occur.
I couldn’t call my husband fast enough.
(to be continued)
Epic Fail or Epic Win Part III
The claim was denied. Then it wasn’t because you know, law.
Then the insurance wanted to pay me $10,000 to settle.
They sent a letter basically patting me on the head and sending their best wishes on my “fresh new start”.
I was advised not to settle, so I didn’t.
The 100-year-old pipe that ruptured and caused the flood was called a “trunk line”.
It is 6ft in diameter and carries water from the reservoir into the city. That night, I was told by a DWP official, 30,000 gallons A MINUTE had burst through the asphalt and formed a flash flood that took out my store. It took them over 6 hours to turn the water off. Are you wondering if they were liable? Yeah…DWP said to have my lawyer file the paperwork and they would get back to me in a year and a half. After all, they were busy, they were having water-main breaks almost daily. Days turned to weeks, weeks to months.
Now, I know what you’re saying, life isn’t fair.
I once had a snarky t-shirt that said something to that effect.
But I did everything right, and I trusted the system. I carried the big insurance policy, with the giant monthly premium, I kept meticulous records. I had every receipt. My books were completely transparent, and yet somehow that wasn’t good enough.
Somewhere the tables had turned and I was the villain in this drama. Farmers Insurance asserted that I somehow had a direct line to God and had arranged for a flood to come and wipe out my store because business wasn’t great. Like you do.
It was 2009. Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual Bank, and Circuit City were among the over 200 big businesses to file bankruptcy that year.
Stupid big business! They could have just asked God for a flood and saved themselves a lot of trouble.
After 18 months it was clear, I had to lawyer up to get any real money from the insurance company AND DWP. Oh yeah, and a third lawyer because my landlord was suing me for every dime of back rent.
Realization number one:
Well, life isn’t fair is number one, so…
Realization number two:
Insurance companies will do ANYTHING NOT. to. pay. you.
They will drag their feet, and lie and be just horrible. And that surprised me.
Realization number three:
You still have to pay all the bills on a flooded, cut up, closed business.
No slack…no kidding. That STILL gives me a stomach ache.
Realization number four:
Next time ask God for a fire.
It’s feeling pretty Epic Fail right about now, isn’t it?
(To be continued)
Epic Fail or Epic Win Part IV
Let’s get to the Win, Right?
I’m gonna tie it all up now in a nice neat bow.
Readers digest version. Get the Kleenex.
Kidding…sort of.
I sued and was sued every which way you can imagine.
And it is really not my nature. I’m not the litigious type.
I’m the artsy-fartsy type. I’m a lover, not a fighter.
I was a fish out of water…swimming with sharks.
In one of the numerous depositions I found myself wanting to blurt out, Can’t we all just get along?
Some of the people who worked with me were great. Gary and his company were great. Others were not. Let’s just leave it at that. You know who you are.
There were no more miracles.
God had shown off early in the game, with two back to back and I knew I was lucky to have those.
But the quota had been met, and now she was uncharacteristically quiet.
She must have been working on more important matters…like world peace.
So I prayed for an answer. Why me? Crickets.
I prayed for relief. There was none.
I felt ignored and alone.
When I felt emotion at all, it was rage.
Now I realize she WAS there, she just wanted me to go inside.
To pull up my big girl pants, and find my own courage there.
After three years I eventually recouped 80% of the COST of my merchandise. Then the lawyers took 40% of that.
I owe everybody in the world money, and I’m slowly paying them off. I probably owe you some money—get in line!
I’m normally an optimistic, happy person. My sister used to ask me “who blew sunshine up my ass.” This had turned me into a sad sack. I became super serious, with absolutely no sense of humor, (which COULD have saved me).
I’m not proud of what I’m about to say: Having reached my fifth decade of life and never really having failed at much of anything—I had absolutely NO coping skills whatsoever.
Some people handle adversity with strength, wisdom, and grace. Yeah. That was NOT me. I was more likely to go live under a bridge with the trolls. I hated answering the phone or looking at the mail. It always seemed to be bad news.
But…I’m SO lucky!
Honestly!
I always had a roof over my head and plenty of chocolate to eat. My husband never left me, which was a miracle, given my disposition and the fact that 2009 sucked for his profession, construction, as well. We made it through with our deep unabiding love.
Oh, come on! Let’s get real! That and copious amounts of wine!
My friends and family have also been there for me, helping me feel like I wasn’t a total deadbeat. “Look, you took a shot at your dream,” they said, secretly grateful they still had their day jobs.
The bottom line is this:
I know things always work out for me.
I WILL pull a rabbit out of my hat!
Some days this transition feels big and beautiful and perfect. Others, not so much. But that’s okay too.
Now looking forward to the next chapter,
And I’m starting to believe that the best times of my life are ahead of me.
I’d say that’s an Epic Win!
(To be continued)
Epic Fail or Epic Win Finale
My reasons for sharing all of this are twofold.
I must admit he first is purely selfish I still have a dark pocket of pain around this situation that still holds me down.
And I’m finally done.
I’m done with the shame.
I’m done being scared.
I’m done feeling unworthy.
I’m done not trusting myself because I think I led ME astray.
I’m done punishing myself
And I’m done being diminished.
And by that, I mean living a small and measly life because I’ve listened to the peanut gallery and they’ve convinced me that’s what I deserve
Here’s where the Epic Win comes in.
I NEVER would be writing this blog had things stayed the same. This energy has been wanting a conduit for 20 years and I wouldn’t allow it. Not as a jeweler, because I felt safe and not as a store owner because I never had a minute to spare.
But the real reason was: I wasn’t in enough pain.
There! I said it!
The pain made me do it and it’s been such a gift.
So now that I’ve found this outlet of writing,
I wanted to share my feelings at the same time I was processing all of the curious things that happened around the loss of my business. It has been at once cathartic…and extremely uncomfortable.
Re-living these events can bring me right back to the smells, sounds, and most importantly now, now that I’m finally able to really process them…the shitty feelings.
I was in “get it done” mode, so I stayed pretty numb.
I’m done with numb!
When you numb the sadness you also numb the joy.
That is a price I’m no longer willing to pay.
I’m not certain if it was just that it’s the same time of year,
or that four years have passed.
Sometimes it seems like a million years ago or the day before yesterday.
Maybe it’s my newfound commitment to vulnerability,
But I felt compelled to share this story via my blog.
What I know for SURE is we all experience a wake-up call in our lives. It can be disguised as an accident or an illness, a panic attack at three in the morning, a divorce or break up, the death of a loved one or another profound loss.
It leaves us open and raw and ready for change.
So there you go!
That’s the second reason.
Everyone’s life looks so shiny and perfect from the outside.
I know mine did. But here’s the thing, we all have our shit.
Really. You are not alone. Here’s MY expensive, crazy, messy, miracle inducing, wake up call.
It’s changed me in ways I can’t even express.
But it didn’t kill me.
I’m a grown-up now, finally! My eyes are WIDE OPEN, and that’s a good thing. I feel endless compassion for people going through their hardships. I’m done pretending things are great when they’re not, so I’m an open book, (much to my husband’s chagrin, because he’s still pretty private).
I’m reaching out and helping people, at least that’s my intention.
Thanks for indulging me.
Wanna tell me your Epic Fail/Epic Win stories?
Xox
