Friday, November 14, 2003

Mr. Rogers for President (of the company, that is)

I swear to Maude I had an entry in here yesterday! Apparently drafts are deleted if you don't post them the same day? Hmmmm.

Didn't make it to the priory Wed - maybe tonight instead. Also did not get thank you's out. This weekend I SWEAR!!!

How in the hell am I getting dragged back into this whole freaking area rug/ CostMart online fiasco??? I thought I'd ducked that headache when Shelly got back from vacation??? Oh yeah... I got a panicked visit from the junior double doh after Shelly had left for the day. Somehow she'd gotten it into her head that I was involved with all the work Shelly's been doing to iron out the business process side of things. Basically, Shelly can't finish her programming until some fundamental questions are answered by our buying dept. and CostMart. But nobody's thought of these yet. Example: how are we going to handle orders with multiple rugs that are backordered and therefore ship one at a time? CostMart is demanding that we give them *a* tracking number - but we'll have several. Turns out, part of the "requirements" nobody gave us before demanding we go live was that we have the ability to ship ALL orders at ONCE - no partial shipments or backorders allowed!!! This is supposedly true for BOTH our online and in -store programs. If a rug is out of stock we're to notify EVERY single one of the hundreds of stores and costco online so they can take the rug in question down from their sample rack and make it unavailable for purchasing.

So what's the senior doh!'s take on this (John)? "Oh, the 4-6 week order leeway should take care of the backorders" (nevermind that it does NOT, currently - we very often have orders backed up well beyond 6 weeks) and just *pretend* that we ship all at once. I'd like to know when Microsoft built in "wishful thinking" capability as part of their development platform. Maybe in Mr. Roger's neighborhood of Make Believe that shit might work, but not here in the real world!. Whose going to magically intercept the calls from the irate customers that get partial shipments? Big Bird? Bert & Ernie?? No, it's now going to be CostMart that's taking these calls so they're GOING TO FIND OUT pretty damned quick that we're lying to them. What a fucking moron. I would kill to find out what John has on Stan that's keeping him from getting his ass fired. He's totally and completely incompetent!

Junior Doh! is just about worthless. She's a buyer - all she knows how to do is find pretty rugs and get the best deals on them. Stan can go blue in the face demanding she & the rest of the dept. step up to actually "manage* their respective product lines, but they have no clue - and end up begging us to do that part of their job for them - then resentful as hell when we refuse. Which would be a good tactic, you'd think except for the fact that nobody, least of all Stan is actually holding them accountable for their intransigence and incompetence. Oh no - he saves that for us.

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