08:23 – I never did hear back from USPS tech support, but things started working normally again as of this morning. We now have our backlog of kits labeled and ready to be picked up.
One would think USPS would have learned a lesson from the catastrophic rollout of the Obamacare website, but apparently not. They did a system “upgrade” with insufficient testing, and that caused show-stopping problems for a whole lot of people. Nor was it just the USPS Click-and-Ship website affected; eBay shippers were having the same problems. Here are just a few comments about what was going on. I hope they have the problem fixed, but who knows? Maybe I was just lucky this morning.
At least now we can get back to building and shipping science kits. Things are still going pretty well. With a week left in February, we’ve already exceeded kit sales for the first four months of 2013.
10:14 – Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention. Before I was able to print postage labels this morning, I had labels in my cart from as early as Tuesday morning. The USPS site correctly updated the shipping date to today’s date, but they didn’t change the expected arrival dates. So, I ended up with labels with a ship date of 2/21/14 and an expected arrival date of 2/20/14 or 2/21/14. Geez.