andy reagan only the interesting stuff

Clothing Order Madness

I started working to order clothes for the team this year, at the beginning of the fall semester.  It has been an incredible roller coaster, and I'm not done yet,  but can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

There are a few reasons that the order this year has been so much more difficult than last year, here are some:

• Over the past summer, we had listed extra clothes on the website, and I got tons of emails about them.  I quickly sold all of those extras, but hung on to names and emails.  In this way, there are significantly more people who ordered clothes this year, beyond just the team.  Right now, I have 136 orders.
• We switched companies this year, which made us jump through some hoops to pay them and just generally made it more complicated.
• The VT Purchasing Department couldn't get the lead out of their ass.  (apologies for the language haha, it took them over three months to make the payment).

I'm going to switch gears a little to keep this from being a complain-fest haha.  A week ago, I got word from Funkier that the order was done, and they were shipping it.  That was Thursday morning, and was great news!

So, I realized that I needed to figure out a way to keep track of who needed what, to put the orders together, and ship them efficiently.  I had wanted to find a way so that I didn't need to do it all by hand...but couldn't really think of one.  So I took information from the spreadsheet (which is pretty much unusable for practical purposes it is so large), and put them into Word, with one order per page.  The goal is that when the clothes get here, I can take each page with an order on it, fill that order and put it in a plastic bag.  It has the name and email and address on it, and the order itself so I can check it off as I add things to that order.

It took me a little over five hours of straight Alt+Tab and Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V and typing to move all of the data.  It was painful, but I listened to some music and just cranked that sucker out.  The result: 136 pages in a binder, each with the details of one order on it! Here's a look at my own page haha:

My own order in the printed form.

So that's my update haha, OH and tracking it...Monday I tried putting in the tracking number in at DHL.com and couldn't find it, I called them and after 15 minutes on the phone they couldn't find anything and so I emailed Funkier.  It has shipped, just strangely, and as of April 11th it was leaving Israel.  Things I'm scared about: paying the customs charge (12% of invoice total) on a $22K order....

More to come when it gets in!!

Where the heck are the clothes?

I just spent 30min on the phone with DHL...didn't really get an answer as to where they were, other than that they might be between Germany and the UK...but that's hard to see from above! They could be here as early as tomorrow though! And the Winter Jackets from LG should be here tomorrow for sure (UPS tracking doesn't suck).