So things are unraveling at work rather severely. It was nice and smooth there for a while, and now everybody feels like they're getting jerked around again and has to live in constant fear of getting chewed out no matter how perfectly they do their jobs. I'm hearing "I don't fucking care anymore" like every 5 minutes, and I think someone may genuinely storm out sometime soon if it doesn't settle down.
For my part, I've been dealing with tons of fucked up situations lately. I work on a team that arranges customs clearance and delivery of international air import freight for a specific customer account. My primary responsibility is to review all the documentation for incoming stuff to make sure it's in perfect order, and pursue corrections for anything that's wrong or missing, hopefully before the shipment arrives in the U.S.
The past month or so, it's like everybody all at once all over the world forgot how to fill out documents properly, and in general became pants-on-head retarded about their jobs. At the same time, our customer is horrible at planning and behind on all their order scheduling to keep up with production. So they're screaming about how everything is super urgent and needed yesterday. And to top it off, our customer is also going through a special audit review period, where any fuck-up on the clearance process of anything can result in monumental fines.
And to extra special top it all off, we recently replaced our QLH, who is the official authority on anything regarding customs clearance. They're currently in the process of questioning everything everyone does, and failing pretty horribly at being tactful about it. Our work is very, very detailed and pretty much everything we do has been decided on by a higher authority at some point. But she keeps asking for explanations, and talking to people as if they're crazy for doing things that way - not acknowledging that the process wasn't their decision in the first place. And I wasn't even working here yet when most of these precedents were established, so I can't even back them up much of the time.
So I got the paperwork for this new shipment yesterday that is all kinds of fucked up. It's very similar to a shipment I had last week that was a horrible mess. I got in some minor trouble for not bringing that one to the correct person's attention in the correct way when verifying some technical information, and then the actual entry was so complex that nobody knew how to do it. I ended up having to work out much of it myself, when everyone else gave up and refused to look at it, and was already late enough that it was gathering fees for sitting at the port for too long. This shipment is not only similar in nature to that one, but it had 3x the paperwork attached.
So I warned my supervisor that this shitstorm was on the horizon. I then went and talked to our QLH about the details as to how I should approach this. She ended up being completely unhelpful about the specific questions that I had, and nitpicking on other things that I really didn't think were necessary and were bound to open a big nasty can of worms. So I told her I would write up a draft e-mail, approaching the problem the way she requested, and have both her and my supervisor review and approve it before sending. I knew it was going to be horrible. So that's what I did. I addressed our contacts with the customer and the shipper with very carefully laid out details about what questions need to be answered and what needs to be corrected on the documents, nagged my supervisor and QLH until they finally reviewed and approved it.
And a couple hours after I send off that e-mail, the shitstorm begins. Our station manager, the top person in the office (I'll call her Katarina, since I strangely found out today she wishes that was her name), received a call from our customer's global compliance manager (the person we ultimately answer to on everything - I'll call him Big Mac). He calls her, because I put one person in copy on that e-mail that he apparently doesn't like. They'd had a fight at some point in the past, and Big Mac doesn't want to see this person involved in anything. That person is our account manager for the entire european region. I had no idea this history between the two existed, and there are multiple reasons I had to put him in copy. Not to mention the whole thing was reviewed and approved by two authorities over me.
Yes. Petty, childish shit. BUT... Katarina practically worships Big Mac as a god. It doesn't matter what the situation is. If he contacts her about anything that makes him unhappy, she is going to find some way to make somebody pay for it. Katarina is also a very intense person. She's one of those people who radiates her emotions. Everyone knows exactly what she's thinking the moment she walks into a room. She loves to make people squirm. Very, very high-maintenance. Has a reputation for making people cry. And rarely has any clue what's going on on the operational level. Has no idea what difficulties her employees regularly face or what their responsibilities are, even when she's reminded constantly.
Katarina storms out of her office and starts interrogating me about this e-mail. Within 20 seconds, there are 6 people arguing over my head about whether or not I had good reasons for copying this person into this e-mail, and whether I was following our SOP process (which Katarina also worships) down to every exacting detail... which is bullshit because NOBODY follows the SOP exactly because nothing would EVER get done if we did, mostly because our customer and their suppliers completely ignore it even though they agree to it... but we all do our best to hide this fact to prevent Katarina from going nuclear. After it's thoroughly proven to Katarina that I was justified and following proper procedure by copying this person in this e-mail, she clearly cannot let it go and starts looking for other things to nitpick. Until Big Mac calls her again and forces her to retreat. That took a nice 20 minutes, while I had another shipment sitting in front of me the whole time that our customer was expecting yesterday, because the responsible party neglected to send us documents until 5 days after the shipment arrived. Just one of several situations that were all exploding at the time.
While Katarina is on the phone with Big Mac, he responds to my e-mail... tells me good job and answers my questions. He compliments my work, while he is on the phone with my boss getting her all up in my shit. After she gets off the phone with him, she has to run into a meeting. On her way she tells me to remind her that she wants to sit down with me afterwards and go over some things about that e-mail with me. The entire network crashes just a couple minutes before the end of business hours, and she still isn't out of her meeting. So I leave. And oh how I don't want to return tomorrow.
We all pretty much work in a constant state of anxiety, because we're beholden to rules that everyone is supposed to follow collectively. But the people we do business with don't follow them. We don't have any leverage over them. If we're hardline about the rules and refuse to proceed on that basis, people don't get their stuff on time and production lines get shut down, potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour... and then we're the ones that get put on the spot for it and have to prove in excrutiating detail that the reason everything went to shit is because we were following the rules, which is a humongous challenge considering the amount of paper trail that needs to be painstakingly generated to have the requisite proof... and we'll still be treated like idiots just because everything went to shit and we were involved. Or we discreetly break the rules, because most of them don't matter and nobody really cares about them. But when it's found out, it's grounds for getting in even more serious trouble. And the rules keep changing all the fucking time, and it's like pulling teeth to get anybody to so much as send an e-mail so that you have something to back up what you've been told to do.
Not to mention we're severely understaffed. We have just enough workforce to get the minimum job done when the workload is light and nobody is sick or on vacation. This because our customer has a $14 million cost reduction goal for their fiscal year that they're squeezing us on, and we have our own profit growth markers that we're required to meet, which we can only do by further cutting costs because demanding more for our work is out of the question. Because the executive business world thinks it's totally reasonable that less people do more work for less pay year after year after year so they can report "growth" to their shareholders.
You can't fucking win.
Nobody knows just how badly I want the whole corporate business structure of the world to crumble to ash. We would all be so, so much better off.
Note: All the above drama is generated by the mere process of picking up a few boxes of stuff at point A, and dropping it off at point B.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3750107 times)