Sometimes, redundancy isn’t enough. Recently, we ran into an issue with our shipping label printer. It had decided to stop functioning overnight. As far as we knew, nothing had changed between the close of business Wednesday night, and the start of business on Thursday. It always baffles us when something happens during off-hours that can bring our business to a grinding halt. Such was the case with that printer. We couldn’t mail packages through UPS or through the US Post Office. We have two label printers and at first thought the old redundancy plan would rescue us. But after lots of replacing cords and actual printers we learned that we would have to figure out a work around. Within the hour we figured out, well, to be more truthful, Jane figured out how to print the shipping labels with the ever-important barcodes on our regular printer. We had some old adhesive sheets of paper that would accommodate two addresses that we used for most of the labels for that day and then just plain old paper that we taped on to the boxes. It wasn’t the most efficient way to make the labels, but it worked. We knew we couldn’t settle for that arrangement indefinitely. We called UPS and after being on hold for a pretty-long time, we were connected with tech support. With both of us following the instructions from the tech woman we were able to make the changes to have the printer and computer talk to each other again. Phew! When we first started using UPS, we were given a book with carbon paper and address grids where we would hand enter the information and then apply to the box with the corresponding barcode. Talk about inefficiency. When we proved to be big enough UPS gave us a new gizmo where we could type in addresses and get a printout label with the barcode. That machine held up to one hundred addresses in its memory. That was slick. But we soon outgrew that. And finally, we graduated to the present system that operates from a program on our computer and it holds an infinite number of addresses, phone numbers, email addresses AND it can verify if the address is correct. Our US mail program works in conjunction with the UPS program, and they share the same printer. The culprit? An automatic update to our Windows operating system….that happens during off-hours.
BLOG 12
Sometimes, redundancy isn’t enough. Recently, we ran into an issue with our shipping label printer. It had decided to stop functioning overnight. As far as we knew, nothing had changed between the close of business Wednesday night, and the start of business on Thursday. It always baffles us when something happens during off-hours that can bring our business to a grinding halt. Such was the case with that printer. We couldn’t mail packages through UPS or through the US Post Office. We have two label printers and at first thought the old redundancy plan would rescue us. But after lots of replacing cords and actual printers we learned that we would have to figure out a work around. Within the hour we figured out, well, to be more truthful, Jane figured out how to print the shipping labels with the ever-important barcodes on our regular printer. We had some old adhesive sheets of paper that would accommodate two addresses that we used for most of the labels for that day and then just plain old paper that we taped on to the boxes. It wasn’t the most efficient way to make the labels, but it worked. We knew we couldn’t settle for that arrangement indefinitely. We called UPS and after being on hold for a pretty-long time, we were connected with tech support. With both of us following the instructions from the tech woman we were able to make the changes to have the printer and computer talk to each other again. Phew! When we first started using UPS, we were given a book with carbon paper and address grids where we would hand enter the information and then apply to the box with the corresponding barcode. Talk about inefficiency. When we proved to be big enough UPS gave us a new gizmo where we could type in addresses and get a printout label with the barcode. That machine held up to one hundred addresses in its memory. That was slick. But we soon outgrew that. And finally, we graduated to the present system that operates from a program on our computer and it holds an infinite number of addresses, phone numbers, email addresses AND it can verify if the address is correct. Our US mail program works in conjunction with the UPS program, and they share the same printer. The culprit? An automatic update to our Windows operating system….that happens during off-hours.