I inherited an absolute POS postage meter from a predecessor at work. She signed the agreement for a 5-year lease on the damned thing, then fucked off and retired, leaving me to deal with the devil machine.
Why is IT supporting the postage meter? Oh, you sweet summer child. If it blinks or uses electrons in any capacity, it falls to IT or maintenance, and ‘Dougie ain’t doing shit with the stamp machine’ (his words).
This thing is called an iX-3 made by Quadient. I want to enumerate the ways this thing sucks so maybe you can avoid the absolute hell that this machine hath wrought:
-The rubber, remote control-like buttons get stuck under the bezel consistently. It’s one giant rubber pad and it’s poorly designed.
-The back button doesn’t actually go back, and the home button does not go home. They simply exist, existentially unaware of their useless nature.
-The menu will simply up and fuck off to whichever option it wants to go to at any given time. On the 5th minute of entering package measurements and after finding a finger joint that hasn’t been utterly decimated by the 25 psi buttons the machine will simply revert back to the ZIP code. Or the weight. Or just lock up entirely.
-The repair technician often says “Hmm” and “That’s strange” when servicing the unit. Just today he told me a story of a similar iX-3 at another company that was possessed. The staff had him over all the time because the machine would up and start motoring for no reason at all. Turns out a ribbon cable fried, shorted, and caused enough arcing to let the damn thing almost start on fire. I fear our machine was listening, and I fear the reprisal I am about to face.
-Wake up the machine and then weigh your item. If you reverse that procedure the machine will refuse to wake up until completely power-cycled. “Hmm, that’s strange.” says the technician. “Hmm.”
-I tried to feed it a manufacturer-produced adhesive label for an oversize envelope. You know how a masseuse pushes and squeezes and grinds on your muscles? Now picture that, except with a label and rollers that don’t give a fuck. Half a bottle of goo-gone leaves us with an oily sheen, a slight orange odor, and a defiant-looking meter.
-Unplugged the network cable to move it. It woke up instantly, demanding its outside connection. I acquiesced, cowing to its desire. In turn, it locked up and required a power-cycle.
Please, for the love of all that’s good, do not buy lease/rent this machine. You have been warned…
While the balls are biodegradable, it takes two years for them to completely degrade
I hate statements like these…degrade just means ‘cant be seen by human eyes’ but the rubber and plastics will still be there. Humans are cancer
“The little blue balls are made of natural rubber…"
Go on, tell us natural rubber does not biodegrade.
Doesn’t biodegradable mean that they are broken down through biological processes? I’d think that would mean proper chemical breakdown instead of just breaking into smaller pieces.
Those are clearly Crunch Berries, and it’s now clear Crunch Berries are the bounty of the sea!
Your Cap’n Crunch lore is on point
Fuck the independent, they should by banned with their clickbait bullshit titles.
MYSTERIOUS BALLS!!!
Article goes into detail exactly what they are, where they come from and why it isn’t really a big problem…
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Those belong to zoidberg, but we can make hippie jewelry with them.
Do they cut the roof of your mouth when you eat them?
Someone test this…for science
OP here - The post is meant to be humorous, but every non-personified detail is true. If we weren’t locked in for many more years I would ask to buy out our lease, but the penalty is more than if we continued to use the bloody device.
Why didn’t we go with a web-based mailing solution? I wish I knew - our volume is light (thankfully) but I guess someone wanted a physical machine to do the posting and metering.
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