The man in the brown van

I have an account with UPS for my little company. I am not aware if you need to be/have a company to have such an account, but I find it practical, because I don't like to go to and stand in line in the P.O. I don't think UPS is much more expensive, and they come to your door and collect!

But I hate filling out those friggin' labels. There's so little space, and it's so difficult to make sure it's all legible and go through three layers. So I asked my friendly UPS driver if there wasn't such a thing as a service where I filled in (or picked out) an address on their site, and he would have labels ready when he came. No, he said, but you can print the label from the web site, and you don't need a special printer to do it.

Wow, did that make it easier. Especially the subsequent times you use an address, you don't even have to type (or copy/paste) the whole address again, it's saved in your address book.

So it just printed a neat little label for me*, less than half an A4 page (for Americans: A4 is about 8x12"**), and I taped it well to the UPS back, inserted the Nikon D40 I'd rolled in bubble wrap, and bingo, waiting for the brown tank of a van to pull up Monday and do all the work. Oh, and I paid by the company cc too, it saves writing a check later, that also stresses me because it takes time and you mustn't make mistakes.

I realize that this might be oooooold news to some people. But they still automatically give you those hand-filled-out labels when you get an account, so apparently it is far from known and used by all, not even all existing UPS customers.

I love all this computer- and Internet-shit.

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*Funny thing, the normal labels have three copies, but the printed one needs only one printed page, it seems. Maybe because they save the data about the shipment from their web site, I guess.

**From wiki: "The most frequently used of this series is the size A4 (210 × 297 mm). A4 paper is 6 mm narrower and 18 mm longer than the "Letter" paper size, 8½ × 11 inches (216 × 279 mm), commonly used in North America."
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