Last week, I had tweeted about a stack of gift cards
Really wish I didn’t have to enter this one by one pic.twitter.com/Cywyu2gAo9
— Chasing The Points (@ChasingThePts) May 3, 2015
It was 72 in all, and I finally slugged through it and the entire process took 6 hours. It was literally painful. My shoulders were aching from perching over my desk to package all the cards.
I broke down the activities of entering each card one by one into Cardpool and that took 2 hours. This part takes a while because of creating individual orders and saving the PDF’s. Fortunately, I did it on Windows and multitasking using the Alt+Tab keys made it quicker. Downside to that, I don’t have a PDF creator and had a ton of files I had to open individually and print. On the Mac’s it’s very easy to open up all of your PDF documents and click and drag into another document and you have 1 giant “bounded” PDF documents in one file. Then printing it makes it easier.
The toughest part was 4 hours to pick and pack all the cards. I separated all the cards into 5 envelopes. I decided to split them because I didn’t want to put all my eggs into “one basket” because the contents would have been $13,000 worth of gift cards.
I could have made 19 total orders and got the top left box that cost $12.65 to ship and all the cards would have comfortably fit inside.
The Process
When I am doing any activity that does not require much critical thinking, my mind wanders. While packing everything, I couldn’t stop thinking about this post from Miles for Family about closing up shop. Blogging takes a crap ton amount of time. Researching takes a ton of time. Manufacture spending for yourself takes time. Then selling all these gift cards that took 6 hours was laborious. This 6 hours didn’t include the time of unpacking, sorting, and scraping that junk that hide the PIN numbers. That stuff that covers the PIN makes a huge mess and leaves a trail of crap all over my desk every time, no fail.
The worst part? I’m not even sure if I’ll be getting extra miles from the portals. The process has changed. When I placed all the orders, I was under the impression it was status quo so I placed some orders looking for some cash and miles. If everything lines up, it was worth it. If it doesn’t, it’s time to look for a new avenue.
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