A label includes indicia disposed on a facestock comprising cellophane. The system utilizes a telecommunications switching apparatus to rout incoming customer contacts to one or more pools of customer service agents. Persistent querying includes: receiving a query at a first database node and propagating the query from the first database node to other database nodes in the federated database system. The bit sequence program controller counts the number of the bits that require programming in the program word by counting the number of bits of the program word that are not in an erased logical state to determine when the programming should be completed.