Nothing funny about feldspar

Having just spent waaaay toooooo looonnnnngggg trying to prepare some packages for the mail, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

1) It doesn’t make any sense to use the eBay/Paypal “buy and print your shipping” feature if you’re going to go to the Post Office anyway (with those Amazon shipments, for instance), because it requires multiple trips between the computer and the packing station (which are in separate rooms in the basement, ’cause that’s just the way it is).

2) Mandatory Delivery Confirmation (even if it’s only a fraction of the at-the-PO-window cost) and the need to print out another full sheet of paper (and all the tape to stick it down) costs more than the little self-adhesive shipping label I was using. Sure, I get the added benefit of D.C. but it’s a service I wouldn’t normally buy at any price.

3) Amazon’s commission is steep, but I’m becoming convinced that it’s worth the cost. They take care of making sure the object is paid for. Their charges are easily calculated (unlike eBay, where you have to go into your account to see if you got that “insertion fee” refund like you were supposed to, and did you really buy a gallery picture for that thing? and there’s no one place to see every charge associated with an item…. and then you’ve got to go to PayPal to see what they charged for the privilege of using their service). If you use SKUs, you see them on your documents, they’re not hidden somewhere in a database with only esoteric means of recovering them (helpful if you use the SKU to hold extra information, like where the book is located.)

It may seem like I’m fussing about pennies — and in each individual circumstance, I am.¹ But aggregate this over two or three dozen packages a week, trying to keep track of who paid what when and how, taking into account the extra things — like remembering that the buyer paid $1.35 for insurance on a $5 item… it makes me crazy.

I’m a systems freak. Method Good! With a methodology, one doesn’t have to keep track of everything in one’s head (sounds kinda like the Getting Things Done guy). So I’m wracking my brains to figure out a way to make it all easier on myself, because you know, engineers are lazy people.

Just as long as I don’t have to write software to do it. I suck at that, and I’m getting worse with every passing year (what in the name of GGE is “Objective-C”?²)

But first, I have some bookkeeping to do.

1. I probably would have been a pretty good cost accountant, if I didn’t throw up my hands so easily at bookkeeping software. That stuff seldom makes any damn sense at all.↩
2. Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical.↩