From The Messy Desk of Rebecca - Things are moving... slowly.

Hello! It’s time for another post from me doing some admin surrounding the Patreon Prints.

You’re probably wondering why I said I was aiming to send two months of prints out during February but there has been no Patreon Print video or, more importantly, any prints in anyone’s hands.

When I said this I only had two things to do (that don’t directly happen in my house) in order to ship prints out – I needed to change the address on the Business Royal Mail account and I had to order the stamps. Neither of these things are complicated or take much time at all – the main time being taken up waiting for the stamps to arrive, but during that time we sign and package all of the prints, so no time lost there. I was missing some information I would have liked to have, but prints got shipped in December so I thought I knew that everything was working.

I’m learning through this process that I’m considerably more naive than I thought, and if anything, no matter how small, is going to involve someone or something outside of my home, then I need to allow a ludicrous amount of time to complete that job. These are all things that I am learning, and I will be applying it to everything going forward.

When I rang up royal mail to change the address on the account and just ask a few questions about the service, I discovered that our business account had been closed, prints had not been sent through it in December and as a result would need to go through the process of setting it up from the beginning. In theory this shouldn’t take long, but the department who sets it up has to ring you, you can not ring them. So I wait for that, then they need to send me an email, which you guessed it, they did not send. Since I can not contact them, I need to ring the generic business line who tell me that they can’t give me any information about which email address it was sent to (even though I only provided one), and it might have been send to an old, unused address from the old business account which I am not allowed to use (screaming) and is not an active account but apparently they can and are using it (more screaming). They can also not tell anyone to not email that address but she’ll put a note on the file that she hopes someone will see. I again have to wait for an email. Eventually an email comes through, the one week, in literal years, that I am not in the country (even more screaming). For some insane reason, this took the entirety of February. While I did take my work things with me I just did not have the time to do anything than the errands I was there to run (it wasn’t a holiday), and as a result it had to wait for my return home. So the email came through, ready for me to fill in the form and we’re all good. Except we can’t find the form in the attachments, so I email again but I get an instant automated reply that it could take a few days. That’s the stage I’m at. Once we have the form, we fill it out and send it back. They need to do a credit check which can take up to a month, but I’m hoping (there’s that naivety again) I will be able to use some of the services while this is happening, or at the very least it doesn’t take a whole month. Unfortunately I can not speed this process up, and while I am trying to come up with an alternative solution to get the prints moving, in all honestly I’m kind of hoping there isn’t one as it means I’ve wasted an entire month waiting when I didn’t have to. D:

I am furious that this has caused further delays yet again, and I invite you all to be furious with me. Every night I go to bed I feel like I did when I was at school on a Sunday night and I’d just remembered I hadn’t done my homework. I am sick of this feeling and I am desperate to be caught up. I will feel much better when they start moving and I assume you all will too.

Other Admin! I like keeping you all in know with what we’re doing, so here’s a boring finance update! I was in change of doing everything with the finances and while I will be doing that job, we’ve decided it’s best that I start with the new tax year, due to complications that really a professional needs to sort. I have spoken to many people about many things, always under the advice of our new, specialist accountant but quite frankly none of us had anticipated the amount and complexity of the financial work we had been left with. Because of potential legal issues with finances, and as I had previously said, my lack of time, we are currently handing this over to the accountant until I can take over with a nice clean slate in April. This also gives me more time to deal with the Patreon prints. A good decision all round I think.

I’d love to end this update with some pretty pictures and fun stories from my trip but it’s a secret, one that I might never get to share with you. I had a nice, albeit very busy and stressful time, and I loved getting to see some of the lovely things I saw! I hope you all had a lovely February and I hope March brings happy days and lovely memories.

- Rebecca :)

p.s. now that I’m back I should be caught up on all Patreon messages that I can reply to! Sorry for the delay!