So lastnight I'm working all the way up until 2 am. The day was a goddamn mess, and it took that long to clean it up. I'd already agreed to pick up a friend at 3 am, because I'm normally out driving Uber/Lyft Friday nights anyway. So despite being burned out as fuck, I head out and get a couple trips in before picking him up. Get home and get in a couple hours of free time, before going to bed at like 6 am.
Wake up 4 pm. Get a cup of coffee and check on work e-mails. There's a hand carry.
I work in international freight. Arranging transport and customs clearance of stuff importing to the USA.
A hand carry is a super urgent situation, where someone decides that they can't wait for this stuff to move through a normal cargo transport process. So they hire a courier to take the stuff on board a passenger planer as baggage, and part of this process is presenting it to customs as commercial product being imported at the airport.
My company doesn't actually arrange the transportation of hand carries very often. My job is to submit an entry for the goods to customs in advance of the courier's arrival, that the officer checks against what's in front of him and signs the release on.
We received notice of this hand carry a few minutes after the flight had already departed. I'm checking e-mail and seeing this a full hour later. It's only a 3 hour flight. I have to fucking get on it.
I question some details on this paperwork to the shipper and importer, and then scramble to get this entry done after all is resolved. The port they're flying into likes documents faxed directly to the terminal, so I have to run into the office to use the fax machine. I get everything completely finished about 5 minutes after the plane is scheduled to land. Just before the courier(s) would theoretically be walking up to customs to go "Hey we're importing this stuff. Here's our entry number."
So then I wait. Sitting in the office completely alone at 6 pm on a Saturday evening, tending to some other work stuff in the meantime. Sometimes it takes a fairly long time to get off the plane and get your turn at the customs desk. After about 45 minutes, I go to send an e-mail asking for an update. And at that same moment, I receive an e-mail from the shipper stating "The couriers missed the flight. They'll be on the next flight tomorrow morning."
WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCKING FUCK. You ask me for an entry after the flight has already departed, putting me in a spot where I have to haul ass and physically drive into the office on no notice, no time to even take a shower, to make sure your shit goes smoothly. There's like a dozen e-mails that YOU PARTICIPATED IN making sure all is in order. And this whole time, the stuff wasn't even on the goddamn plane?!?!?! Why did you not bother to mention this?
?
My response is stern, but not mean. I explain factually how if this is re-scheduled for tomorrow morning, we need such and such data points provided as soon as possible. Both of these instances were/will be outside of normal hours, on a weekend, for us and for Customs. Shit is likely to be fucked up if things aren't arranged in advance. And these situations are very time-sensitive. Customs is likely to reject our entry and seize their freight if the work is done last minute. That today's failure in communication has effects that are damaging to our business.
It's about 3 hours later. 10 pm. No response whatsoever. Dead silence. Now I have to be up at 7 am on a Sunday morning to scramble this last minute shit again. But I'm also going to be out late driving, because we need the money this week and my friend needs a ride home from work again.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14864122 times)