The Art of Shipping

I spent most of the day yesterday at the UPS Store and on the phone with the US Post Office, UPS, and FedEX. I got disconnected by all three at least once. This meant I had to re-enter their computer-phone network of endless "Press one if..." to get back to where I was before. It also meant I had to start my story again with a new, clueless individual who then had to transfer me to eight other people. And to make matters worse, I got completely conflicting information depending on who I was speaking with in the same company! Argh!

The problem is this: I am to enclose a prepaid return shipping label with my artwork to be sent to the show in Nevada. Stamps and/or a check are not accepted. The prepaid shipping label may or may not be used depending on whether my art sells at the show. As a result, I'd like to only pay for the return if it actually is used. MaryBeth wisely suggested that I open an account with FedEX or UPS. This sounded like a terrific idea. The only issue is that both companies have heavy and intricate restrictions on their "pay-by-account" waybills. In essence, I'll be paying $20 or $30 to ship a 4 lb. package home! (Ground is not an option with this service.)

Perhaps this is more than you ever wanted to know about the movement of packages, but I feel compelled to share in case any of you are going through this or will go through this. Heck, if you're an artist reading this, I hope you ALL go through this at some point since it would mean you're needing to ship your art to a show! I'm going to go into FedEX and the Post Office this morning. I'll let you know how it pans out. The UPS store, by the way, is not really UPS (according to their workers) so they will only direct you to the UPS website if you have any questions beyond just "I need to mail this."

And of course, if any of you out there in BloggerLand have any more insight into this than I, please don't hesitate to share! I'm all ears...

As a result of all of this, no art was completed yesterday. Well... that's not totally true. I did manage to get some ink on my current fabric collages in order to antique some of the paper. So I did about 10 minutes of art. Some is better than none. I really have just resigned myself to the fact that some days as a working artist are all about the business end of things... It's part of the package. As I said in my post yesterday, most of the time I'm pretty darned lucky...