WARNING, WORK RANT AHEAD

It's Friday which should be a day of work serenity, a Whatever kind of day, where cares and concerns are securely filed under 'Monday - To Do'. Instead, I've worked my way into a mid-level work seethe for the 3rd time this week, complete with stress eyeballs and pounding headache; the only thing good about this seethe is that it's a result of me being on the warpath, a strong-willed I'm Not Taking This Anymore response to the previous seethes.

I am up in arms concerning a warehouse in Florida that has been giving our company bad service for the past 6 months, ever since new management took over.  They have sent out double shipments, sent the wrong product, missed ship dates, sent incorrect month-end inventories, failed to correct inventory problems, and have an utterly non-responsive person as our customer service contact.

Some of the product that we store at this warehouse are spent carbon canisters that are identified by a large colorful RSA label with an ID number. We track the spent product RSA#s and quantity of drums in our tracking system and the Warehouse does the same; these lists should match up. When we accumulate a large quantity of spent canisters at the warehouse I have them shipped to a place in PA for recycling.

At the end of last month I arranged for a full shipment of spent canisters with the standard instructions that they are to verify the RSA#s and quantities; if there are any discrepancies to notify me. Welllllll, after the shipment is on it's way to PA I get the Bill of Lading and the quantity shipped is about 1/2 the quantity I had listed to ship.

My blood begins to boil. I call Crappy Customer Service (CCS) who says, "We sent everything we could find." I said everything should have been there, and that I need a list of which RSAs did ship, and which did not from the list I originally compiled for the shipment; this is important because we certify to our customers that their spent material has been recycled. We track this closely. Have I got this list from CCS? Of course not.

By special invitation (this should be their standard procedure), I requested our end of the month inventory faxed to me. Sure enough, it lists all the RSAs our CCS "could not find". My blood really boils! The shipment itself had problems as some of the tanks were poorly wrapped by the warehouse and subsequently tipped and spilled in transit. Tuesday I was on the phone all day sweet-talking the carrier into cleaningup the spill and getting the shipment back on track.

In other instances of bad service, CCS has not made corrections to our new product inventory that I requested twice by fax, beginning back in February. The errors have multiplied with more wrong than right on the list, an outrageous situation.

So, I'm fed up and on the warpath; this warehouse now has a new site manager. Either this guy will deal with, and correct, all this bad service pronto or I will badger my management here to change warehouses (pronto). Most of this morning has been spent compiling documents and writing the Situation/Remedy memo. Kaboom!