Customers Who Think That 5:00 PM Is A Good Arrival Time

My job is a full-time day job.  I work from eight until five, Monday through Friday, with an hour of lunch. We also have a policy against overtime - if you work it, they'll pay it, but it's better if you try to avoid having any in the first place.

I bitch about it a lot, but I really do like my job, because of the people. Most of the time.

When I leave at five, the office is closed.  The computers are shut down for the day, and we are done.

The warehouse guys usually start shutting the computers down a minute or two before five. On the order desk, we tell the computer to shut down at five, and then leave - we figure the computer can reboot or shut down without our babysitting it. And it prevents overtime.

Last Friday, a customer pulled into the parking lot at 4:58, and was in the will call office two minutes later.  The warehouse guys had already clocked out, but one of them clocked back in to help us take care of the customer.

Even better, he was a customer who is ... less-than-reliable at paying his bills and has an extremely thick accent, to boot. His accent is thick enough that I'm the only one in the office who can understand him most of the time. And he's behind enough that our system puts his orders on credit hold - we need someone in our Portland office to release them so that they can be pulled off the shelves by the warehouse team.

He'd placed an order earlier that day, but he places lots of orders, and only picks up a few of them. So we hadn't expected to see him.

When he pulled in at 5:00, I had to call the credit department to ask someone to wait.  One of the warehouse team volunteered to stay a bit late to help. And I got to do the talking.  And, finally, one of the keyholders had to stay here.

It took ten minutes to get the order released from hold (after he paid).  While we were waiting for the credit department, I got to sit through a long tirade about how he's been a good customer for twenty years and why are we treating him like this? It was hard to bite back the obvious response of, "because the money you're paying now is going to invoices from two and a half years ago ... "

Then I went out to help the warehouse guy pull stuff off the shelves.  It wasn't little stuff, either - it was almost a full pallet.  While we were pulling it, the customer backed up to one of our bay doors.

The product he'd ordered came in largeish boxes - roughly two feet tall, three feet wide, and two feet deep. This meant that the pallet-load of product wasn't going to fit into his minivan.

While we were pulling the product, I heard him on the phone to another distributor - apparently we were his first stop that night. And those other guys?  They close at 5:00, too.

Once his van was as full as we could make it, he told us, "I'll be back on Monday for the rest," and then he took off. At 5:30.

This means that my company paid a half hour of overtime for at least three people, not including the credit department people who hung out to assist. And all of us took a morale hit, because it was Friday at closing time.  Who wants to give up weekend?

Was the sale worth it? Financially?  Yes. Probably. But it cost morale. And it trained this customer that his behavior was acceptable, so he'll probably do it again.

And I really don't like that.

Breaking In A New Co-Worker

It's tough when you need to train someone new.

Mind you, it's better than being short-handed, but it still sucks. To start with, as the trainer, you are personally responsible for every mistake they make. Or, at least, that's how I feel.

Maybe it's why I do so much of the training.

I don't talk much about my job here. I complain about aspects of it from time to time, but I don't actually talk much about What I Do.  It's because my job is honestly pretty boring. I work on the order desk for a warehouse. It's part data entry, part receptionist, part customer service, part tech support, and it often feels like I'm someone's executive assistant all at the same time.

I'm responsible for every freight quote out of our warehouse. There are two other people on the desk, and one of them gave notice today.  Six weeks of notice, but notice nonetheless.

This means that we're now hunting for a new person.

Someone I'm going to train.

The job itself isn't all that difficult - but there are a lot of details, and you can very easily get tripped up on one of them. A large part of the training is teaching what to do when you screw up, because our corporate culture is unique.

My first week there (more than four years ago), I was shocked when one of the sales reps told me (in front of his customer no less), "I screwed up. It was my fault."  He didn't try to shift the blame onto me (as the new person) or anyone else on the desk. He had screwed up and accepted responsibility for it. And that's been (mostly) the pattern at the office. I don't know about our other location - I can only speak for the Seattle office on that one. But it takes some getting used to.

The first hurdle in training? It's not the job. We have zero privacy. We're not in cubicles - we're all on the same desk. There is no sound separation between us. Hurdle number two? I have been known to swear like a sailor. J, the co-worker who is leaving, also swears like a sailor.

Once we pass those hurdles, then we start with the basics. Order entry first, followed by the phones, and so on.

Training sucks. Its repetitive and includes a lot of "This is the mistake you made and here is how to avoid it in the future." And if I miss a step, then a mistake will be made down the road that will be my fault for not covering it in training.  There are enough details to stress over that several people have been here more than a year before a gap in their training was discovered.

And that's just the breaking-in for the desk. The new person will have to mesh with the warehouse and the sales reps and our management and the customers and ...

Getting used to the environment and the people is actually harder than the job itself. And it's rough on all of us for the first few weeks.

I'm not looking forward to it.

Rental Cars

My wife and I were rear-ended a few weeks ago. No damage to us, but the car suffered a few scrapes and scratches.  We weren't at fault, so the car is in for repairs. And we have temporarily acquired a rental car.

Our car is a Saturn Vue. A 2007, with the V6 engine.  This is a small SUV with a surprising amount of power. We don't have the all wheel drive version, just the front wheel.

The rental is a Dodge Caliber. It's not a bad car. It's just not ours.

"We only have two rules for the car," they told me before I signed the paperwork, "No smoking and no pets." Neither is a problem for me - my wife is allergic to smoke and the cats don't like riding in the car. And we don't like having the cats in the car, either.

So at least the interior doesn't smell like smoke or dogs.

The steering wheel and the pedals are the wrong distance apart - when I can reach the pedals comfortably, I feel like I'm hugging the steering wheel. When the steering wheel is comfortable, the pedals are a stretch. And the steering wheel blocks too much of the instrument cluster - I wound up having to decide what I was okay with not seeing.  The car is just not designed for someone with my proportions - the armrests are too low. I like to rest my elbow on the armrests while I drive, and I can't do that in this car. And I hit my head on the door frame every time I get into the car.

The ceiling is too low; I feel like I'm driving a cave. The fact that the windows are too small doesn't help. And they're small all the way around; the blind spots in this thing are terrible. I normally hate changing lanes - and that's in a car with decent vision out the sides and rear of the car. I can't see where I'm going to be heading in this thing.

There is static on the radio - it has built-in Sirius, but the rental agency doesn't pay for it, so I can't listen to it. So I'm stuck with the static.

The acceleration profile is too different from our car, too. When I push the pedal, I expect it to go. This one? Doesn't. I suspect it has a standard four-cylinder engine - and I'd wager this car weighs about the same as my Saturn.

The suspension is awful, too.  I can feel every bump on the road - and taking a speed bump? Not fun. At all. I don't know if the suspension is shot because it's a rental car, or if some smartass thought a sports suspension would be the way to go for this car, but it makes for an uncomfortable drive.

And it's interesting - "Nimble" is not a word I usually think of to describe an SUV, but, compared to my Vue, the handling in this car is downright sluggish. Combining this with the poor blind spots mentioned above, and lane changes really suck. I'm just glad my commute doesn't generally involve much swerving or dodging.

And I miss my heated seats.

I'm only supposed to be in this thing for a few days before I get my car back. I just hope I can manage without going insane in the meantime.

Static

While in a rental car a few weekends ago, I had the opportunity to become re-acquainted with something that future generations will not have to endure.  Static on the radio.

I've become spoiled in my usual car - we have both HD radio and Satellite radio. Neither of these suffers from static.  It's like Digital TV - you either have signal or you don't.  HD Radio is slow in catching on. One more reason I'm glad I live where I do.  Here in the Seattle area, I have a number of stations available in HD, including both local NPR affiliates (which I listen to a lot).

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I dislike my long commute. It gives me plenty of time to listen to the radio, however. And I do listen, because otherwise I'd go nuts.

When I was a kid, I used to have a clock radio. It was a really bad one, with really crappy radio reception. Everything I listened to was static-filled. And I hated it.

Instead, I listened to a lot of tapes - but I got tired of only having the same limited selection of music available to me, so I would listen to the radio for a few days, gritting my teeth against the static. Usually, I'd hear a new band or group or song, and would buy that tape a few days later.

Compact Discs were the same way, only better because they didn't wear out over time. They were digital.  At the time, the difference between "digital" and "magic" was only that one was real and the other wasn't.

Then I discovered streaming music online.  I remember thinking If only I could listen to digital music in my car!

And now I can. And do. Constantly.

The stereo which is in my car is now in its second car. In fact, my wife and I both found ourselves getting angry at the factory stereo before we upgraded. To the point where I was borderline road-raging nearly every time I sat behind the wheel.

It's not a good place to be, so it was only a few weeks before we upgraded the factory stereo to the HD-radio we had pulled out of the previous car. Because we just couldn't take the static anymore.

I look forward to the day it is abolished completely.