This particular group has been in a crisis state in their supply chain for over a year. Their global planners keep moving more production demands onto them, without expanding their operations to match. As a result, they're constantly taking product off their lines and racing them out the door to deliver in often less than 24 hours. They have air cargo, charter planes, and couriers running stuff around at all hours. They face heavy penalties (tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars) if they don't get parts delivered to their customer's production plants on time, and the timing windows in every step of the shipping process are often less than a couple hours, or else the shipment flies wildly off track. So their emotional investment in every shipment is fucking fate of the world level intensity.
What I've done is roll with it this whole time and rarely let them down. Saved their asses hundreds of times.
-Taken over deliveries many times from other carriers who were failing them.
-We're not staffed 24 hours, so I've personally stayed up many, many late nights to manage their customs requirements at every hour. To the point that I'm soon going to be officially working late shift from home just for them.
-Taken the brunt of several cbp officer's anger over the stupid shit they pull (like going on passenger flights with hand carts loaded up with over 100 kg of car stereos). Negotiated and micro-managed smooth recoveries from those situations, or even convinced officers to make exceptions.
-Employed all kinds of stupid loopholes and rule bends to make things happen that shouldn't have according to standard processes.
What elicited the comment tonight was they called to tell me they have a courier taking off at 1 am tonight, and landing in New York at 5 am. That means I have to transmit paperwork to customs at 1 am, and then be on again 4 hours later to monitor until the courier is released. I have to be poised to jump on the phone to negotiate with some pissy power-tripping officer within minutes if they decide they don't like something. Or else the stuff can be seized and take potentially days to get back. I'm a superhero for putting up with their ridiculous shit
The !!fun!! thing about customs is the rules may as well not exist. Each port has a director who basically makes up their own set of rules. Individual officers often don't know the laws that they're enforcing or have their own interpretations. When you're dealing with them, you have no recourse. In that moment, they have absolute power to do whatever they want with your stuff. I've talked to officers about situations in advance to get direction, did what they said, then *bam* shift change and the next officer disagrees with what the first one said and you're the one who pays for it. I've witnessed officers blatantly say "I don't care" when legal passages were quoted at them that directly contradicted their decisions. I've had an officer lie to me about being unable to see my entry, because he just didn't like the couriers who were standing at his desk. I had an officer once laugh at me over the phone, say "you have no authority to speak to me", and hang up. I've encountered several who literally didn't know how to use their own computer systems. I've heard we had one importing customer a long time ago who got upset when customs held up his freight... sent customs a letter complaining that they were costing him millions of dollars with no legal basis for doing so and threatened to complain to his congressman about them... and they responded by holding his stuff for a month for no reason.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 15889315 times)