Thursday, 17 December 2009

unff

So the post office on Tuesday was not as bad as I'd feared.

Don't get me wrong - it was busy, just not as busy as I was afraid it was going to be. I'd say it was about as busy as a normal Tuesday, or the end of the month when loads of people get their car tax.

Why do people bother getting their car tax from the post office any more?

You can do it online and it's so simple and easy, once you've done it that way once you'll never want to bother queuing at the post office for it ever again. I mean, seriously - click, click, click, enter your card details, click, and you're done. It really is that easy and simple.

Plus it's all on databases now, so the little paper disk you get is just a formality and they send it to you in the post anyway, so you just do not need to bother going to the post office and clogging up the queues for those of us that want to do proper post office stuff.

But the big surprise was yesterday when I went to post the next couple of e-bay items. There were actually more staff there than customers.

I don't know if it was the snow or the freezing temperatures that were putting people off from going, or it was the timing (last post for 2nd class is Friday and Monday for 1st class, I believe), but I was straight in, no waiting, do the business and out again. Really simple and easy.

Of course now that I've said that when I go there today I bet it'll be queuing out the door again!

This is one of the pain in the arse things with e-bay - a lot of people pay almost instantly, which puts a lot of pressure on you to get their things sent as soon as you can. I also try to do that anyway in order to avoid the dreaded poor rating of course, but it does make things more complex.

The reason being because there's always one or two people who take a while to pay. So, for example, I had about 15 auctions end on Sunday and by Monday morning, two-thirds of them were paid up.

Now I couldn't actually go on Monday as that's when I go shopping, but Tuesday I dutifully lugged all their parcels (plus the couple that had paid by Tuesday) to the post office and sent them all off.

So I was basically left with only 4 parcels unpaid by Tuesday afternoon. I sent them all an invoice by way of a reminder and two people paid up. So I trekked to the post office again yesterday, with only 2 parcels.

One more person paid last night, so I'm going again today.

That leaves 1 person unpaid and I sent them another message yesterday basically saying "if you don't pay by tonight it'll be next week before I send it"... and he's not even acknowledged my message.

It's a right-royal pain in the arse. If I waited until all the auctions were paid I'd piss off the early payers and get poor rating. But this way I end up having to make loads of trips, which is both really annoying and also costs me loads in postage.

This is part of the reason why I get sick of doing e-bay stuff every time I start on a new session of selling stuff. All the lunch-times wasted in post office queues just becomes really draining. Plus of course there's the fact that it gets really annoying the small return I get.

When you look at the total amount I'm supposed to get by way of payment from people winning my stuff, around half of it goes to other people. First off, e-bay charge you insertion fees (!), then they take 10% of the winnings (for doing very little). PayPal take a big slice in fees (for doing jack shit) and then of course there's postal fees (about the only bit I don't really mind, except for the fact that recorded costs too much).

When you then start to consider how much padded envelopes, sellotape and even car park charges cost it all gets a bit depressing really.

And yes, I did say earlier on that we got some snow yesterday. It started coming down about mid-morning, and somewhat to my surprise it settled on the ground. Well. it wasn't really surprising, because it was so frigging cold for most of yesterday the snow couldn't possibly have melted.

It's meant to be okayish today, but then there's going to be a cold snap tonight and heavy snow is forecast for tomorrow around here. I don't expect I'll be dramatically snowed in like the last time. I expect it'll just make the journey to work treacherous.

It's a pretty miserable and rant-filled post today, huh?

Well, I'm tired and I've had too much work to do and my holiday is still two days away.

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