We printed some very cool shirts for premiums for WMBR which is a community radio station (that I happen to have two shows on for the past three years.) It is a great station which is all volunteer, and I have done the premiums for them for about 25 years.

Things are almost always done right because in this case it isn’t about money, it is about personal support for the station and we work extra hard on getting things done correctly. This year the prints look great, we delivered it all early, and…and  I screwed up the counts.

The shirts are mostly American Apparel and with the bankruptcy issues I thought it was better to order some of the shirts early. However, then in the middle of some work problems I forgot to increase the order when the final numbers from the fundraiser came through.

I hate hate hate making mistakes. However, I had to eat crow on this, nobody’s fault but my own.

So what do you do?

First thing is you admit the error and find a remedy, you don’t waste much time figuring what happened as that can come later.

The remedy is that I got my local distributor to have shirts ready the next morning and somebody came in on the weekend and set up the screens, and we printed shirts first thing Monday morning. Second is that we did the mailing for the station that afternoon thereby only delaying the shipping from Saturday until Monday, which meant most people still got their premiums before Christmas.

Second thing you do is figure how to avoid such an error in the future.

Despite my anxiety about getting this order correct I should have followed procedure and had a customer service person handle the whole thing as soon as I could possibly get it out of my hands. Jumping in to “help” is often no help at all since it throws off the system.

Lesson learned the hard way. Yecch.