Something I’ve noticed quite a bit lately is companies trying to ship stuff to me via UPS when I’ve given them my post office box as the ship-to address. As most of you know, this doesn’t really work very well.

I first noticed this last year. I would go to pick up one of my boys at their mom’s house to take them to dinner and they would present me with a package; generally something I didn’t expect. It’s not that the package wasn’t welcome, just that it was something I didn’t order. When I checked the address label, it showed the items had been shipped via UPS to my P.O. box and ended up at the home of my ex-wife.

I thought this odd, but didn’t really pay much attention because it was stuff I didn’t order.

A couple months ago, I was contacted by a representative of a book publisher asking if I would be willing to read and review a book they were getting ready to ship. I agreed and emailed the lady my P.O. box address as where to ship the book.

It was shipped via UPS and guess where it ended up … yes, at my ex-wife’s place. Again, not a big deal because I go there a couple times per week. Still, it was somewhat inconvenient.

A week or so later, my wife (the one I’m married to now) placed an order for over $200 worth of merchandise and provided our P.O. box for the ship-to address.

It was shipped via UPS and guess where it ended up …

All the packages delivered to the wrong house had 2 labels on them. One specifying delivery to the P.O. box and another, presumably stuck on later while it was in the possession of UPS, with the wrong physical address.

At this point, I figured that since UPS has somehow has tied my P.O. box to a house I haven’t lived in for several years I ought to give them a call and try to get them to associate the box with my current physical address.  I called and spoke with several very nice people who had no idea how this could happen since “we don’t deliver to P.O. boxes.”  They promised me they’d check into it and also call the local UPS office to see what was going on.

My wife called the local office herself to try to work this out. She was told the same thing: They’d try to figure it out because they had no idea how the packages were getting rerouted.

The last package which sent via UPS to my P.O. box was lost. The person who sent the package told me the UPS tracking website shows it was delivered, but we don’t know to where or to whom. Good thing it was a freebie or I’d be a lot more upset.

I have a suggestion for shippers: If you’re going to ship via UPS (or FedEx), don’t let people specify a P.O. box as the place to have it delivered. This is very easy to do:

• Put some verbiage on your order form specifying that you don’t ship to P.O. boxes.
• Put a check on the client side and the server side to screen the address input for P.O. box information.
• Again, let the customer know you don’t ship to P.O. boxes and request a physical address.

Better yet, let customers specify a P.O. box and screen orders to ship via post in those cases. Believe it or not, there are some people living in rural areas who don’t have street addresses – they only have P.O. boxes.

It shouldn’t be up to us to read your mind and know you refuse to ship via post.

I have two suggestions for UPS:

1. Set up your shipping system to screen for P.O. box information in the ship-to address. Don’t accept packages you plainly advertise you can’t/won’t deliver. -or-
2. Set up a system where customers with P.O. boxes can associate a physical address with it and let them change it if it’s incorrect.

If you’re going to accept packages destined for a P.O. box, you are responsible for making sure it gets to the right person. Sorry, but “We can’t help it if the shipper designates a P.O. box” doesn’t cut it.

What about you? Have you had a similar experience to mine? How, if at all, were you able to resolve it? Please feel free to let us know in the comments.

WARNING: Major Geek Content …

Last week my colleague deployed an update to one of our many web sites. This particular site was originally coded in Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005. She updated it in Visual Studio 2008, successfully using the automatic update tool VS offers to run when you open up a project created in an earlier version of whatever VS you open it in. There were no issues when we ran through the site on our test web server.

All was looking good until we moved the web site code to our production web server. All the apps on the web site were working properly except for one file upload application. For whatever reason, this one hunk of code decided to malfunction. We’d run into problems similar to this one which turned out to be caused by a missing patch – so that was the first place I looked.

Sure enough, for some reason our WSUS server didn’t push out all of the service packs for the various versions of the .NET Framework to this server. To fix this, I ran Windows Update on the server. As it started the service pack install I got an error: 0×643. Bummer!

A quick search found the solution on Microsoft’s support site in Article ID 923100. The short version: manually uninstall all versions of the .NET Framework, reinstall them and then run the service pack install. Easy enough, I supposed.

I spent 2 1/2 hours of my Saturday uninstalling and reinstalling. When I was all done I opened up the web site only to find it was erroring out with the “Yellow Window” generic error message. Time to stop, think, and not over-react.

Thankfully, we have a VPN and Remote Desktop so I could multitask from home that day. After taking time to swap laundry loads from the washer to the dryer it hit me to check the web site settings in IIS. Good thing I did because there was the problem, bigger than Stuttgart (as we used to say when I was in the Army) – the ASP.NET version selected in the ASP.NET tab in the web site properties was 1.1xxxxx instead of 2.0.50727. A quick change and a restart of the IIS Admin Service got everything working as it should.

I can only guess that the IIS settings were automatically changed when the .NET Framework 2.0 was uninstalled from the server. It makes sense – and it makes sense that one would need to go reselect the proper version of the Framework. Since that wasn’t spelled out in the Microsoft article, I’m warning you here.

Hopefully you won’t have to go through this yourself. If you do, though, don’t forget to check the IIS settings before declaring yourself finished.

Your Frustration
Errors, glitches, failures and crashes are going to happen and they are frustrating. This is especially true when you’re working on a web site project with your IT Department or other techies. Think about it: you’re trying to get the new or updated web site project finished so you can move on to other things and you find features which don’t work, pages which won’t load, images missing … it can be very frustrating.

Then, when you report problems to your techies, they sometimes seem to drag their feet and don’t fix things right away. Worse is when they tell you they don’t see a problem on their end – and you’re looking at the problem on your screen.

Many times, these frustrations can be eliminated, or at least minimized, by better communication. You might be thinking to yourself, “But, I’m in the communication business. Surely I don’t need to improve.” While it’s true you’re in the communication business and in other areas of your life you are brilliant in this area, when it comes to talking to IT people you might not be “all that.”

Let’s look at it from the IT side.
Your techie counterparts are working in their darkened cubicles, hacking out code at a phenomenal rate. They are working hard to finish your web site by the deadline because they want to do a good job for you – and because they have other projects waiting in the wings with deadlines of their own.

All of the sudden they get an email (or phone call):

• “The site is down.”
• “Such-and-such page isn’t working.”
• “Your page crashed.”

They might sound annoyed when responding to you. This is because they most likely tested whatever it is giving you a problem at least a dozen times during development before they asked you to check it out. Also, being tech types, they lean towards linear thinking. They look at or listen to your message and a bunch of questions come to mind.  They sigh and think, “Here we go again” because they tell people (not just you) over and over they need more information if they are going to efficiently and accurately help you.

Here are some tips which you can use to help you better communicate your way through technical issues when working on a web project with your IT people. These are also quite handy to use when working through any tech support-related issue.

1. Be Descriptive – Don’t skimp on the details. Think of the “W’s.”
   One of the things they will have to do is reproduce the error to see what caused it. The more information you can give them the easier it will be:
   1. Who – of course is you. Is anyone else having the same problem? Ask around if you don’t know.
   2. What – The most important whats when troubleshooting web site issues are: What Operating System is your computer running? And, what web browser are you using and what version is it? If you can’t answer those, ask your IT people how to find out which you are using. Other important whats: What were you doing? What did you click on? What did you enter in the box?
   3. Where – What was the address of the web page you were on? Where was the link you clicked on?
   4. When – About what time did this happen? How long did it take from click to error?
   5. How – Is up to the IT folks to figure out.
2. Copy and Paste – If you get an error message either print it or copy and paste the message text into an email.
3. Use Screen Print – Sometimes copy and paste doesn’t cut it. In those cases, a screen print will work better. Keep in mind, you can’t do this if you’re troubleshooting a total operating system crash. Print screen creates an image of whatever is showing on the monitor you can paste into a file and email.
   Here’s how to do it:
   1. Keep the window with the error showing
   2. Hold the “ALT” key on the computer’s keyboard and hit the button labeled “PrtScn”.
   3. The “PrtScn” button is usually near the number pad on the upper left part of the keyboard.
   4. Open word or an image editing application
   5. Paste into a new document or image file.
   6. Save the file.
   7. Email the file.

While there is such a thing as “too much information,” in my opinion it’s better err on the side of giving too much than not enough. Also, be prepared to answer questions because they will arise. If you don’t understand some technical jargon in the questions don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.

Feel free to share …

If you’re a tech-type: what tips do you have for others who report problems with projects you’re working on.

If you’re a non tech-type: what kinds of things have you learned to help others communicate better with their technical people?

photo credit: mccun934