Tag Archives: parcels

An eBay Sort of Day

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We ended up sending 14 parcels this morning, which took a bit of application. We posted one to Canada, one to France, one to Italy and one to Portugal. Who would have thought I’d end up as a packer of International Parcels?

The tests I did at school indicated outdoor jobs like farming and being a gamekeeper. Now I work in the windowless backroom of a shop.

The twists and turns of my life have been mighty strange.

I’m thinking about becoming a writer next, with a book about a man who is haunted by the ghosts of his youthful dreams. At the moment I’m trying to work out a way of introducing an Egyptian mummy into the plot. You can’t sell human remains on eBay so that’s a non-starter. I’ll have to check the rules on Amazon…

In the afternoon I took Julia to Beeston – the one on the edge of Nottingham rather than the one in Cheshire – to buy a copy of Medal News. The shop has been mentioned, with picture. I bought the last copy in W H Smiths, took it home triumphantly and found I’ve bought the old issue. It seems that although the subscribers have had their copies, and have been getting in touch with us (mainly to tell me I’ve put weight on) the newsagents are still flogging the April issue. Ah well.

Today’s picture is a rather battered Staffordshire County Ambulance Service Badge. That sort of non-numismatic item gets passed on to me. It made £20 on eBay, which was a surprise – I knew it was a good badge but I thought the damage would hold it back, and we posted it off this morning. That’s the magic of eBay – you don’t need to know much to make money.

Pack, Pack, Pack!

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We turned up at the shop today and found we had a record number of packages to send off. A normal Monday sees us with anywhere between two and ten parcels to send. Today there were fourteen. Not only that but one of the orders was for twenty eight medallions to go to Australia.

That required a stout box, brown paper and some old-fashioned wrapping skills.

We sent out pennies and sixpences, several coin sets, a seventeenth century token, two lots of banknotes and a variety of other things I can’t quite remember.

We also bought some coins (including a stunning Gothic Florin) and turned two lots of stuff away as it had originally been bought from the Sunday supplements and were thus (a) expensive and (b) poor quality. This is always sad as we know we are disappointing people, who often buy it with an eye to either investment or leaving it to grandchildren.

I’m tempted to use the word tawdry, but it seems a bit cruel, even though it does allow me to use an interesting link.

At the moment it’s a bit of a sore point as we overpaid when buying a few things that turned out to be very cheap on eBay. We will have to transfer some of the cost to the other things we bought. Some you win, some you lose…

The moral of this is don’t buy from people who spend a fortune on advertising, as you are paying for the advertising rather than the item.

And if you want to leave something to the grandchildren put some money into a savings account.

Can Spring be Far Away?

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Today I fine-tuned my packaging techniques and learned the mysteries of the scanner. I haven’t scanned anything for over ten years so it was an interesting half hour, not least because I couldn’t find where the computer was storing everything. As a result I spent a lot of time going through files looking for images.

It seems that if you leave the scanner number as the name of the file it is stored in a different place to the ones you rename. I stopped renaming them when it was suggested it would make things quicker. What slowed it down again was trying to reunite them, and trying to identify the non-renamed ones from a meaningless string of numbers.

After finding them I then spent a lot of time trying to load them.

If you’ve never tried it, let’s just say that it makes WordPress seem so simple…

At the moment, although it’s wet, and intermittently gusty, it’s quite warm, which is very pleasant after the recent cold weather. There was a news item tonight which showed Nottingham Prison as it was last week. The skies were grey and there was slush by the side of the roads. It wasn’t just a different time, it looked like a different lifetime. That’s how quickly we forget.

Add a steadily lengthening day (the days in Nottingham are lengthening by just over three minutes a day at the moment) and things are really quite cheery.

Also on the news tonight, the company that refurbishes old British telephone boxes – yours for only £2,750 if you are looking for an impractical greenhouse, or somewhere to install a landline at the bottom of the garden.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Phone box with defibrillator – Heckington

 

How to Pack a Parcel

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I had a crash course in shop work today. Ebay shoppers had a sudden urge to bid last night and we ended up with fourteen parcels to pack, including several with multiple items and two going overseas. This job can be quite exciting at times.

I’ve not quite got the hang of it  yet, because the ebay site has changed a bit since I last used it, and not necessarily for the better. However, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

The stages of packing a parcel are –

Check ebay notification

Find item (stock control will, I hope, improve when we move shops)

Select correct envelope

Insert item into envelope (which may require wrestling and ingenuity)

Add compliments slip

See if it goes through the slots in the card we have – Large Letter or Small Letter

Weigh

Select appropriate postage rate for size, weight and country

Write postage on envelope

Put appropriate sticker on – Signed for, Special delivery etc

Stick stamps on

Seal

Write address

Write return address

Air Mail sticker (if necessary)

Customs Declaration (if necessary)

Simple enough, you would think, but I managed to cock it up several times. There are a number of ways to get it wrong if you are new to the job, talking at the same time and thinking of that delicious salad your wife is making you have for lunch. And that’s before you drop the pen, stick a stamp on upside down, lose the stickers…

All in all, an interesting day, for me. I’m not sure it makes riveting reading though, as I seem to have failed to capture the drama and romance of putting coins and banknotes into padded envelopes.

Tomorrow it might be a medallion. Who knows? Life can get pretty crazy at the cutting edge of retail.

The coin in the picture is from the reign of Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603). It was actually one of the detector finds from the farm, but I thought a coin picture would look good seeing as I work in a coin shop.