dragonlady7

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So we sell film developing on Etsy.

My job is to run the whole Etsy site, and sometimes i develop film, but I’m not up on the lab procedures here and so mostly I just run film down and sometimes I’ll twincheck it (every roll of film gets its tongue extracted from the canister, and we have these great really substantial metal-foil stickers that are two identical ones in a row with a number, and you stick one half to the negs and the other half to the bag, so you know which film goes with which order) and get it ready but the extractor tongue here is semi-broken and I’m not up on its quirky points so I don’t often even do that, unless I’ve got a complicated order. And I was developing the black and white film myself, by hand, but the store manager is trying to convince the company owner we need our own BW machine so I’ve had to pack the BW up and mail it to the main store instead, and that’s fine, whatever.

Anyhow. (I also do all the online order entry and some of the price changes and all of the product photography and editing of those photos and some of the listings, and I still don’t work a quarter as hard as the fulltime guy who runs the online store. It’s all more work than you’d think.)

I came in this morning to a message from a customer that she’d gotten back someone else’s negatives instead of her own, and when I was like “oh she probably forgot what was on the roll” and asked her to check the twincheck stickers– and sure enough, her bag said 2595 and 2596, and the rolls she’d got back were 2596 and 2597.

Fuuuuuuuck. I went to my Completed Orders page and meditated for a moment. How do I figure out whose other orders went out at the same time? She’d ordered in December, and took forever to mail hers in; that day I’d gotten no less than fifteen envelopes, and some of them had been new orders and some a little older, and some of them were done and some have BW film so they’re still sitting here. And there was film in the store that day too, local customers– one of them could have her negatives, and since so many people nowadays are developing old rolls they cleaned out of a drawer, they may not know what’s on their film and so if they got the wrong thing they may just shrug and say who knows what Grandma took photos of, y’know? Fucky fuck fuck.

The twin-check is such a basic, ingrained thing, that never fails (I’ve literally never made a mistake with it and I’ve worked here since ‘07) that we have zero backup error-checking of any kind. Why would we need to?

So I’m tearing my hair out– at best, I’m going to have to email a bunch of recent customers and say ‘Hi, I’m a really unprofessional jerk with no concern for your privacy! Can you rummage through your recent order from me and see if someone else’s precious property is in there?’ And at worst, I’lll get no affirmative responses.

And then another message arrives. From another recent customer, a regular even. 

“Hey I think… I got somebody else’s photos? I don’t recognize one of these rolls?” And in response to my desperate follow-up, “Yeah! My bag says 2597 but the roll says 2595!”

Oh thank fucking christ. 

The guy who fucked this up for me, by the way, has been working here since 1983, so. I don’t know what procedure I could really change to prevent this, and I know if I make a big deal of always checking the twinchecks on my orders he’ll get offended, but fuck, that could have been so bad. (I guess I’ll have to quietly double-check all twinchecks when he’s not looking. I mean, fine. Listen I work really hard to keep on his good side because he’s a sour old fuck* but he’s never going to leave and is an institution in this institution of institutions so the cost of being nice to him is worth the benefits of him not hating me. He hates everybody and I Do Not Want That.)

[*I say that but he just baked a really elaborate cake for the other old-timer whose birthday it was, and actually I do rather like him, he’s just mean to everybody when he’s not being weirdly sweet]

So I sell film developing on Etsy, and I keep getting super annoyed because the site collapses my item descriptions under a Read More, and then customers don't read it, so they don't know things they need to know to buy the thing, and they buy the thing and then ask me questions the listing answers like right there for them, this is not rocket science, whatever.
anyway.
i wrote up a thing, like, here's the problem, here's what i've tried-- and one of the things I tried that had the most success is that I put the really crucial information into a little text block that I Photoshopped over the default listing image. That's been the most helpful thing, but I need to tell them more than will fit onto a single image.

The problem is that people don't read stuff, I get it, so I asked for other advice-- like, I got it, you can send an email with their order confirmation, I put the relevant info into that, but that's not customizable. I need like, a conditional thing, if they order X it asks them Y, if they order Z it reminds them it doesn't come with X included, that kind of thing. Because otherwise it's just too much information and people won't read that much.

I got a few helpful responses, a lot of commiseration (some of it quite funny), and

an astonishing number of people who didn't read the whole thing and told me I ought to try overlaying the text over the default listing photo.

Which MAKES MY POINT and is HILARIOUS but it would be really rude to tell a person who's gone out of their way to try and be helpful that they were absolutely proving my point: people just won't read shit.