If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

Yesterday morning my dotted-line manager (P&L) came up, to ask whether I thought I could find a used-exchange match for one of our big-dog Roswell gaming portables, in a real hurry.  Turned out that he’d gotten an SOS from someone in Sales who was trying to help contain an escalated Consumer case that was threatening a huge multi-national corporate account; the Roswell portable in question belonged to the president’s daughter, and a previously-set-up system exchange had been mired in bureaucratic Fail for three weeks now, so the president was ready to take the corporation’s account, with its seven-figure annual spend, elsewhere.  P&L asked me whether it might be possible to find a refurbished machine that would match the hardware spec of the original system, and would ship sooner than ten days from now, which is the minimum lead time for a new-build machine to get built.  I said give me a minute to look, and I’d tell him.  He said fine, and forwarded me an email chain to give me an idea of what was happening, what was wanted, and who needed to know about it.

I dug into the used inventory at Returns, and lucked into a system that matched Daughter’s original.  I stuck it into a shopping cart in my ordering tool and emailed the laundry list of managers, account executives, and high-powered upper management to say “hey, I found this used system that matches, do you want me to order it for her?  Oh, and I need to know in the next ten minutes, ’cos the shopping cart will expire in fifteen and dump this system back out into general inventory.”  Five minutes later I had an email from someone in India, who turned out to be the vice president for Consumer Services, saying “please yes, let us ship it.”  So I got the order for the refurb set up, and ten minutes later emailed the laundry list saying “OK, the refurb exchange dispatch is set up, and I’ve alerted my contacts at the fulfillment center to watch for this order and make damn sure it goes out the door tonight.”

A little later, I got a snippy email from some level-two consumer support tech in India, asking me WTF did I think I was doing as a commercial agent meddling in a consumer-segment unit exchange, that they were going to cancel my order, and I was to get my nose out of their damn business.  (Well, it was dressed up in politer language than that, but that was what it amounted to.)  I fired back that they needed to get a lot nicer to me in a big hurry, ’cos I did what I did at the express direction of their own vice president, and if they didn’t like what I had done they could fucking well take it up with him, I wouldn’t put up with being hectored for doing them a favor.  And I cc:’d the vice president, just so he’d be aware of how his underlings were acting.

Meantime, I had the sales account executive for the large corporate account on the phone with me, telling me to get the new-exchange dispatch fixed, and if I couldn’t do that, here was his corporate credit card number, get out on the Empire.com Web site and order a new Roswell system for M. le président’s daughter, order it to be delivered to the account exec’s home address, and he was gonna drive it over to her, himself.  I realized this was the wrong time to hold a debate about whether that plan would do any actual good, and said “yes sir, right away” and placed the new order.  Fifteen minutes later, I emailed him “OK, here’s the order number, placed exactly as you told me to.”

With that off the front burner, I dug back into the new exchange that had never shipped to find out why.  It didn’t take me long to discover that the order was stuck because whoever entered it (in India, but I probably didn’t need to tell you that) had entered half the SKUs twice, resulting in an invalid configuration that would never ever ship.  And no one in Manufacturing had yet gotten around to looking at the rejects queue, so nobody knew this was an invalid order and would never ship.  I swore some at the idiots who had entered such a mess, cancelled the order and tore everything out, then re-built it in a configuration that would actually work and re-launched it.  Once that was done and I saw the order drop to in-production status, I emailed the account exec again to say “here’s why that first exchange never shipped—after, that is, it had sat around in bureaucratic limbo for two weeks waiting for this and that approval; I fixed and re-launched it.  By my count, we now have one refurb and two new systems ordered, and all pointed at this one escalated case.”

Then, in the middle of all that whoop-te-do, I started getting emails from the manager of the level-two consumer tech in India, wanting to know what was I doing, had I been in contact with the customer to tell her she was getting a refurb, I needed to be sure she was aware because she was expecting a new system, and on and on.  I told him that what he thought was just a garden-variety consumer escalation was actually the above-water portion of an enormous Corporate iceberg, that his “consumer” escalation was placing a huge corporate account at risk, that I did what I did because his VP had explicitly told me to do so, and if he screwed this up with his meddling and we lost the corporate account, we’d all know where to assign responsibility, now wouldn’t we?  And then I cc:’d all the engaged Corporate people again, so everyone knew just who was being an obstructive ass, and just what kind of an ass he was being.

And that was how it sat when I left yesterday afternoon.  This morning, I came in to find an email from the Consumer VP asking for a status update, and an email from the refurb fulfillment center saying “O HAI, we shipt ur used xchange like u sed, here iz FedEx traking numbr.”  I sent that info to the VP along with information I had on the two new-build systems in the pipeline and copied all the laundry list, and told the VP I was getting push-back from manager xxxxxxxxxx in Consumer tech support who didn’t seem to understand the scope of the escalation, and perhaps a word from someone in his organization would help manager xxxxxxxxxxxx understand.  Which was a polite way of saying “get this motherfucking idiot of yours OUT of my HAIR, I’m tired of getting the third degree for doing YOU a favor.”  I guess I got through, ’cos a little later I got this meek email from the manager saying “we understand that the Corporate sales account exec is point of contact and will keep the customer informed, we’re going to go away now, kthxbye, Sahib.”

And that was what my Tuesday was like.  What was your Tuesday like?

The Warren Commission will hold an unscheduled meeting at Groom Lake.  Fnord.