Karin's Adventures

After seven months of high productivity and a feeling of purpose, sitting in a quiet office with a real door, to be able to complete a highly important project with an extremely tight deadline, I have been relegated to my prior workspace in a cubicle.

While about 40% of US office workers sit in those contraptions invented in the late 60’s, 93% of those workers wish they were somewhere else.

The reasons have been researched, they are obvious, everybody knows – an average of 70 interruptions on any given day, 29% lower productivity compared to workers in an office with window and door, lack of focus, lack of privacy.

 Now, like most people I can’t pick where I sit when I do my job – but I can decorate my cubicle, organize my desk, and bring some of my own tools to work.

My latest find on Amazon is called a “privacy panel”. I call it “the ultimate do-not-disturb sign”. Now, if I could just learn to tune out noise, chatter, and other people’s phone calls, I’d be almost as productive as somebody with a real office.

When we moved to the USA in January 2006 we had most of the contents of our 840 squ.ft. condo shipped in a 40 ft. overseas container. Books, clothes, computers, dishes, kitchen wares, small electric appliances, and furniture had to come with us – because we figured shipping the household was still cheaper than buying all new stuff.

Our bed is a typical, standard German double bed: two seperate orthopedic cold foam mattresses on slatted bases, mounted next to each other in a 200cm x 200cm bed frame. Of course we brought all the bedding for it too, so we were in good shape.

Now, even expensive bedding that you take good care of will come apart after over ten years of continuous use. Some of those sheets and duvet covers started to look like the ones my mom would relegate to the weekend cottage in Austria. Just go buy new ones, you might say. It’s not that easy, though. Fitted sheets in Twin XL size work for our mattresses, but there is absolutely nothing that would fit our down covers.

That’s what Amazon Global was invented for! Here’s how it works: go to Amazon.de, search for “Bettwäsche” and then filter your results by “Amazon Global bestellbar” – bingo! My latest order arrived today, fits perfectly, and looks awesome.

My heart skipped a beat today when I received my first order for an ExxoPok cell phone pouch coming in from my own little handmade e-commerce website http://exxopok.karin-web.com

I designed this unique belt clip phone case out of personal necessity in October 2015, when I joined Google Fi and had to somehow attach a big Nexus 5X smartphone to my belt. After making several of those handy pouches with the “angle of dangle” for myself and family, and selling three of them in person, I set up a shop on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/shop/exxopok and actually sold 37 of my ingenious gadgets there by now.

Good business practice is to diversify, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and have multiple sales channels – even if you’re just treating this like a hobby without any aspirations to turn into a “full-time job/income”. Plus it would be a good learning experience for me to get into newer techniques of web-development.

So, in December of 2016, I added the ExxoPok subdomain to my Karin-web.com domain, found and customized a free html5 template that I like, installed the Ecwid e-commerce plugin on it – which is also free if you list no more than 10 items, and worked hard to get the whole thing optimized for Google’s search engine. Being found on the internet is the hardest thing to do. It takes time, and you have to keep “talking” about your stuff, posting on social media, blogging about it, creating link authority for your site.