Stamps from the minds of kids (or entrepreneurs?)
Today’s Hartford Courant has an article about a company in Connecticut that helps schools and other organizations raise money by selling custom stamps, with designs created by the kids.
The article doesn’t explain why you’d need to use a company like this rather than dealing directly with one of the custom stamp vendors, though. The ‘entrepreneur’ talks a lot about his research, his pending patents and such, but never explains what value his company adds to the process. And yes, there is actually a patent application on file, claiming that this idea is an ‘invention’!
Video: Postal worker makes way for ducklings
From WKMG TV Orlando (I like how the web article refers to the little web-footed creatures as ‘chicks’!
Shock!
One of our customers is shocked when one of his customers reveals shocking news about the USPS! (Whatever you do, don’t tell him about FedEx- it may just put him over the edge!)
Sacramentune: One of my customers…
Postage Due 1/27
Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan
Subscribe to Postage Due:
Signs of abuse
From Flickr: Looks like the Royal Mail has problems with its customers…
Postage Due 1/26
Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan
Subscribe to Postage Due:
When blogs go bad
OK, so it wasn’t that dramatic- certainly nothing like the MySpace outage. But we did have a couple of problems today. The main postalnews.com page started loading very slowly at some point during the day, and it apparently had something to do with the poll we added a while back. Removing the poll cured the problem, so we took it off for a couple of hours. It’s back now, and the site is still running fine, so we’ll just keep an eye on it.
The other issue was with this site, postalnewsblog.com. We upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, 2.1, which is quite slick. Unfortunately we neglected to make sure the final step in the upgrade completed successfully, and as a result, looked a little blank for 30 minutes or so. Once that was taken care of, we discovered that the new WP broke the template we’d been using. We’ve switched to Shamsul Azar’s Tiga, which I really like.
Any comments you might have on the new design are welcome, and don’t forget to bookmark postalnews.info, our backup site, for when blogs REALLY go bad….
Postage Due 1/25
Postage Due- an original comic strip by Mike Morgan
Subscribe to Postage Due:
Priority Mail great, tracking not so hot
Our cell phones had been acting up lately- refusing to hold a charge, failing to connect in places where they had always worked, etc., so I figured it was time to get new ones. On Thursday afternoon I logged in to the Verizon Wireless web site to check out what phones were available for our calling plan, and selected one (making sure I got the USPS employee discount!). Before too long I got an email confirming my purchase, and shortly after that, an email saying the phones had been shipped.
I’ve bought stuff online enough to know that a notice that an item has shipped often means ‘we sent it from the warehouse to the shipping room’, so I wasn’t too concerned that there was no info on the USPS Track and Confirm site the next day for the packages. I checked again on Saturday morning- still no data. That led me to believe that the phones probably hadn’t really been shipped at all yet.
So I was very pleasantly surprised when my rural carrier blew her horn and waved a pair of Priority packages at me. Yep- ordered Thursday afternoon, delivered Saturday morning! The packages came from either Texas (that’s where the mailing label said they were ’shipped from’), or Pennsylvania (the meter strip insists they were ‘mailed from’ there!).
Either way, great service! Now if we could just get the tracking part down. Just for the heck of it, I checked the numbers again a few minutes ago, and there’s still no information. Makes me wonder if they ever got scanned at all- and yes, the confirmation numbers provided by Verizon match the ones on the bar code labels on the boxes.
On the other hand, I purchased another item on line last Friday. This item was shipped FedEx, and the tracking page at FedEx.com has been providing information about each and every move the package has made. The problem is that those moves haven’t added up to much so far. Since last Friday, the box has only made it from Sun Valley, CA to Bloomington CA. According to Google, that’s 64 miles. At that rate, it’s gonna be a while before it gets to Massachusetts!