It was a long day and a longer night. Quite long actually for a normal working week (which in December usually is somewhere between 50 to 60 hours due to the way IT service business seems to work in our region). But it is done. In one monumental act of energy my wife Melanie, my good friend Claudia and me managed to pack all ADOM Lite RPGs (for all the folks who up to know validated their shipping addresses). There are a few more that need to be done at some point (because they are moving right now, have not yet validated their addresses or whatever) but the vast majority of all RPGs is going to be send out in about two hours. Read on for the dirty details…
As is to be expected for people not very experienced there were a couple of botches during the processes but I believe we worked out all of them (and we double or even triple checked):
- We lost a lot of time in the beginning (after an hour of work we had finished only the very first package) due to preparatory work (which partially wasn’t useful as we learned later).
- The stickers I bought were the first thing to go… it took too long to get the back off from the sticky side (because we had to manually cut the stickers to size due to vast differences in the lengths of global shipping addresses… never believe that 200 characters are enough for street addresses). This probably was the biggest problem that caught up with us.
- While packing I found a total of 3 bugs in my code that generated the ordered sequence of the numbered RPG issues people receive (based on the point in time when they donated). Luckily all bugs were caught early enough and everyone gets the right number. But my heart stopped all three times because we had finished dozens or a hundred packages when those things popped up and I feared we would have to unpack a vast majority. But the gods and the RNG were with us… none of the bugs had affected packed packages. Whew… This probably was the second biggest problem that caught up with us because I again and again had to print new picking lists.
- Closing the shipping envelopes with those metal gizmos proved to be very time-consuming (and painful to our appendages). I’m very grateful to both Melanie and Claudia who took the brunt of the pain. Lesson learned: Don’t be part of a crowdfunding campaign that has to ships thousands or tens of thousands of physical goods (only if you are so organized that someone else is doing the fulfillment… but then take care that you don’t have to sign or personalize thousands of goods 😉 ).
- Filling out the customs form on each envelope took a lot longer than expected. As the physical value of the books is not very high (you basically paid for writing the stuff… printing it costs about $3.94 per issue with Lulu) I hope that there won’t be any problems with customs for you. But I noticed that I have no actual idea (keeping my fingers crossed).
- Only once we got briefly confused with the order of shipping labels – which proved time consuming to sort out. But due to the extreme structured organization of Claudia and Melanie this went surprisingly smooth although we worked on increasing our level of parallelism all the time.
- At some point we ran out of boxes to use for storing the packed envelopes. Luckily that was close to the end so that it was easy to find an alternative.