The meficomp blog

Site looks bizarre at the moment, and was down for a few hours.  Apologies!

It’s taken me longer than I’d like to admit to get some of the CDs in the mail, so if you’re tapping your foot and glancing at the old wristwatch, mea culpa.  Be assured that these things are going out; I’m nearly caught up as of last night, and I intend to make that ‘nearly’ turn into a ‘completely’ by tomorrow evening.

Thanks for your patience, folks.  It’s on its way.

We’ve had nice music profiles up for our twenty-four recording artists for a while now, but we’ve been missing a couple of important non-track folks. Missing now more, though:

Please say hell to John “interrobang” Ralston, our art editor and the man responsible for generating the fabulous portraits featured in the liners.

Greet, also, the talented Sarah “turtlegirl” Scully, the golden ear responsible for mastering this masterful collection.

Thanks again, you two: you have rocked my world.

In or near New York City?  There’s an awesome meficomp release party on Sunday, December 3rd.  Get your details right over here!

In or near Portland, OR?  Track 1 dynamos The Harvey Girls (now features yours truly, Track 5, on banjo) have a gig on Wednesday, December 6th.  Details here!

Wondering who did the awesome cover art for the CD?  Can’t figure it out from the liner notes?  Wonder no further: it was done by metafilter’s own shortfuse—details on his site.

Wondering why you can’t get a better look at all the album art on this site?  Wondering why we don’t have an Errata page listing things like the shortfuse goof?  Wondering why there’s no calendar for these time-sensitive events?  Me too!  Check back next week, when I hope to make those things exist!

These things are going out!  Rock! 

I have mailers!  I’ve got postage!  I’ve got mail-merged address labels!  And, most importantly, I’ve got three boxes full of pre-orders ready to take to the post office as soon as I get off work this afternoon, and more to come.

So now I need to scour the site for the phrase “pre-order” and get rid of that “pre-” part.

Yay!

Short version:

Due to an Office Depot snafu, I don’t have my padded mailers.  I’m working a different route, and should have mailers by this time next week if not sooner, to commence shipping ASAP.  Thanksgiving Weekend will probably affect this a bit, alas.

Long version:

So I was hoping—expecting, really—to start stamping and addressing and mailing out CDs this last weekend, but I ran into a problem: my padded envelopes didn’t arrive on Friday as they were supposed to.

Turns out that when their webpage described the shipment as “Delivered”, what they meant was “crap, we’re out of stock.”  I’m not sure how exactly that came about, but here we are.

So I’m going to check out a couple of other options.  The wife may be able to swing something via some powerful shipping demigods with whom she is conversant, and I may be able to find a verifiable, tell-me-you-have-them-in-your-hands vendor locally.  (I could buy these things right now by the twelve-pack, but I hate to waste the money—that increases the unit cost by 50-75%.)

One way or another, though, these things are shipping by next week.

Random aside: I just tripped across this comment on Ask Metafilter, from mefi-thesis-writing mefite Quartermass in October, 2005:

We need someone to curate a Metafilter compilation, as there are a number of people making great independent music here.

Capital notion!

No, no. Don’t talk. Just sit back. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Mmm hmm!

Of course, that’s the finished product. The after. There was also a before, ere we had such nice finished products. There was a final mastered mix CD from turtlegirl, an order form from the good folks at CDman, and a certified check for $1510:

I was just tremendously excited about my Wednesday discovery of the ahead-of-schedule appearance of the CDs. “Ooh,” I thought, “I can start shipping these things this weekend! Before Thanksgiving! Wow!”

And then I thought, wait—I haven’t ordered padded mailers yet! I’d better get on that, and pronto! I checked with my local Office Depot store, because it’s within walking distance, but all they had was 12-packs, at about $0.70 a unit. I can, I thought, do better.

So I went to their website. Lo! 250-count boxes, at about $0.40 a unit! Yay! And free next day delivery! Woo! Yeah!

Everything was coming up puppies. I placed an order for one of those 250-counts, with guaranteed delivery the next day (Friday) no later than 5:30.

But 5:30 rolled by on Friday…and there was no package from OD. So I checked the site. “Delivered”, it said. I checked the UPS tracking number. “No information,” it said. And definitely no package.

According to OD, “delivered” means “delivered to UPS”, not actually delivered. According to UPS, they never saw the package, because that tracking number provided by OD doesn’t even exist. And according to a customer service rep from OD, there’s nothing they can do except “escalate” and/or “regress” it. Bah, ye bloody frackin’ so-and-so.

Right! So no envelopes yet. Which makes mailing things this weekend a bit tricky. I may attempt to leverage some Customer Dissatisfaction today with the local retail store, but I’m not exactly a pit bull by default. It may just be I wait till Monday before anything happens.

They’re here! I’m going to bed! Stories tomorrow!