How we coped with the recent madness.

I remember from my working life dealing with the "disaster recovery plan", the famous DRP. There were all kinds of levels, depending on the extent on the disaster. Something like a hurricane or tornado, or like what happened in Haiti, something that destroyed physical facilities and injured or killed part of your work force is major, and would involve, at least at my previous company, a nationwide response. My company was a business of course, their major priority was to meet (or exceed) their customers needs & expectations - to get processes up and running normally as quickly as possible. It could be very complicated, but that's why they paid us the big bucks.

My emergency was not nearly so comprehensive. My computer was rendered useless by a nasty trojan horse, or worm, or virus, I'm not sure. I described it in my other blog so I won't go into it here.

But, even though it was on a very limited scale, I had a disaster on my hands. I had obligations I needed to meet and my capabilities were severely reduced.

Monday we did not list any new items. Normally I print address labels and invoice statements - I send out an invoice statement with every item - but I could no longer print. My computer was physically hooked up to the printer & my wife prints from her computer thru our little network. None of that was working.

So Monday, for the first time in my 3 plus years of selling on eBay, I printed out addresses by hand, and wrote out a simple invoice, also by hand. That's how we recovered from the disaster of not being able to print.

My desktop computer was not functioning - at least not safely - so we unhooked it and brought down the laptop. We did a little router rewiring for my wife's desktop and she was able to get online. My laptop has a wireless card, so it picked it right up.

Later Monday afternoon I downloaded a printer driver to my laptop, and could print as long as the printer was physically connected to the computer. We still could not print from the my wife's computer, but for now, that it was ok. It meant that we were fully functional again, at least as far as our eBay business was concerned. Tuesday, even though I was using a laptop instead of the desktop, was a normal day, eBay wise.

I got the computer back Tuesday afternoon, complete with a re-loaded operating system, and we hooked everything back the way it was and lo & behold, it works.

I should have downloaded the printer driver earlier Monday, and I wish I had. But I still able to get things shipped to my customers. These were payments that had come in over the weekend, for the most part, and I had sent them all emails telling them I'd ship on Monday. I was determined to get their items on their way to them, and I did.

So, that's how we coped with the recent madness. This seems to be just one of a series of events happening this month that impacts our business.