spoiled chinese girl

Saturday brought on a whole lot of memories.  I attended the first Toronto based Suspension school.  And since these events generally happen around the same time, it reminded me that exactly 5 years before I had first jumped headfirst into the community, and the experience of everything that surrounds it.

Now I’ve begun learning how it all is put together.

I’m more than excited.  I can’t wait.

Drunk instead.

All week I've slept between 2 and 4 hours a night.

Going downtown near every day to attempt to unfrazzle a very frazzled man only to realize around midnight that I need to go home in order to wake up to have my ass in my chair at work for 7am is tiring. I don't mind, because he knows I…

<+3 him, since <3 isn't <3-ish enough. I forget what else was written here. Something about sushi, coke and rubbing Texans to keep them warm.

How utterly frustrating is it to have one of your customers go “Hello?  I asked for tile A and you sent me tile B.  I clearly ordered tile A, and your paperwork says tile A but I physically have tile B in my hands right now.”  And for us to go “Sorry, you should have told this to us 2 days ago.  IF you want us to exchange the tiles for you, you are going to have to pay shipping costs to have the wrong tile sent back to us, and the right tile sent back to you.”

Or on a similar note.  “Hey, dingus, you sent us the wrong tile.  And we need this NOW.”  “Uh… well unfortunately all we can offer is to ship this product to you with your next shipment.”  “Hello?? Anyone home there?  This is for a job that is starting tomorrow morning.  We need you to courier us these boxes NOW.”  “Well, we can’t just ship out boxes of tile whenever we make a mistake!”   Why not exactly?  Wouldn’t that get you to like… make fewer mistakes?

I have to say the most fun was most recent.  We had shipped two different orders to two customers.  And somehow customer A ended up missing 6 boxes from their order, and customer B received 6 extra boxes on their order.  Well my boss is insisting like CRAZY that it’s the transport company that shifted the boxes from company A’s order to company B’s order.  Now I’ve been told to “Deal with it” with the transport company.  And the transport company obviously is going on the defensive of “We don’t touch your skids” when we say “You shifted these boxes!”  And my boss is obviously saying “We packaged it right! You shifted the boxes!”  Blame game.  He said she said.  At this point no one is going to 100% remember who put what where, or who moved what where. We just have company policy of “We’re always right” and “You are the one who’s wrong” being thrown back and forth.  A lot.

And because I didn’t know how to handle the situation since all I was doing was running in circles, I was told to “Act convincing.  Because if you don’t sound convincing they won’t believe you.”  One problem.  *I* don’t believe me.  In the past X number of months that I’ve worked at this company dealing with this transport company.  I’ve seen relatively few errors from the transport company.  Not a bloody day goes by I don’t see errors coming out of our shipping staff.

Obviously this was not a situation I could rightly handle.  One of my bosses, very annoyed like, finally took over the situation.  Lord knows that the outcome is, I have no idea because no one’s told me.  Even though both of the customers are customers I deal with.

I feel my time there is limited.  I would welcome the thought.

More about my company.
I’ve been posting a lot of pictures lately because I haven’t felt too wordy, but here are some words.

I don’t understand my bosses.  At all.  I work in customer service.  You would assume that with a title like that, one would be in the nature of wanting to serve customers.

We blame our customers for EVERYTHING.

If they ordered the wrong tile, or the wrong colour, or the wrong size.  Sure I can see how we might want to charge them a restocking fee and make them pay for shipping the product back to us and we’ll ship out what they really wanted with their next order.  That’s just fine and dandy.  I mean, our customers don’t always think so, and I’ve been hit with lots of “So you’re punishing me for an innocent mistake??” questions before, but those I can let roll off my back since, well… yes.  I am.  Because you messed up.  And it sucks it’s gotta be this way, but it’s gotta be this way.

But what if the customer ordered the right tile?  And we shipped it out wrong?  Who’s at fault?  STudies, and customers, would dictate that it is the supplier’s fault and they should make every effort to ship out the correct product as fast as possible to minimize effects of messing up.

What do we do?  We sit and winge and moan.  We check and double check.  We accuse our customers of switching what they received with something they received earlier and want to exchange.  We do NOT give the benefit of the doubt.

Our customers have 24 hours with which to tell us something is wrong with their shipment.  Which is well respectable if they receive one pallet of product.  But what about when they receive one truckload of product?  If something is damaged, missing, or wrong, they still only have 24 hours with which to turn around and say “HEY! This ain’t right!”

How utterly frustrating is it to to have one of your biggest customers go “Uh… I got 3 boxes of broken tile with my last shipment of 22 skids” and have us go “I’m sorry, but you should have told us this yesterday.  Since then we are making every assumption it’s your staff that broke the tiles and we take no responsibility for it.”