Walls, Markings, Weeds, on a Roll

Waterbury, Connecticut

I'll keep rolling along with these wall and weed shots collected over the summer, as there's no time for shooting right now.

On the TOP Platinum Print Offer front, we got thirty packages out today. While it beats standing in line at the Post Office, Ship 'N Click is slow as molasses in January. Not only do you have to key in each individual line, but as the number of shipments in your 'shopping cart' moves up (supposedly you can accumulate twenty before checking out) the program begins to take a second or more to respond to each keystroke! If you try to move ahead and let it catch up, the keystrokes it hadn't recorded yet start to appear in the next field. Yuk. We exited at fifteen, paid from the PayPal account that's been getting a lot of the sale receipts, then dealt with the—idiosyncratic, shall we say—system of printing out the labels and receipts to our laser printer using custom adhesive label sheets. Next set, the system responded to the keyboard normally at first, then the slowdown began on the fifth label. I gave up and decided to key in, buy, and print, five labels at a time.

Over a third of the sales were international, so those will need a different online form that includes customs declarations, then prints out two pages of forms on plain paper that you have to cut in half, insert into a self-adhesive plastic split-sleeve, then attach that to the package instead of a label. Then you have to wait while a clerk at the PO scans in every package. With the domestic ones you can just hand the clerk a whole stack and leave.

Happily, this has changed since the last time I did a bunch of International Priority Mail—you can now just drop off without waiting for personal attention from a clerk.