FedEx and Humans

there was peace on friday-- the small kind of peace that exists by having the chance to help someone get what they deserve because you've been there and no one helped you.

see, the reason my boss kept telling igor's crazy mother that he was busy was not to get her out of the building [entirely], rather that we were in fact very busy. we had somehow managed to make 750 binders for visa, collated and tabbed each of them, and were about to send 1,473lbs worth of merchandise to singapore.

everything was printed on time. everything was packaged on time. everything went as swimmingly as a healthy clan of eager sperm.

but right when the fedex delivery man arrived, we realized we couldn't print our commercial invoice. we'd printed our shipping labels and shrink-wrapped the entire thing. but without the commercial invoice, nothing was going to singapore. nothing was going out the door, in fact.

"this is michelle, and i will be your web support agent," she told me over the phone.

"hi michelle," i said, "there's a problem with the webpage, and it won't allow us to print our invoice."

"oh, i do apologize for that," she said back, "hit ctrl p and it'll print."

"yeah," i said, "it will. but it will only print what's on the page. the invoice is not on the page. so that doesn't help."

"if you click the "commercial invoice" box and then hit ctrl p, it'll print both."

"no it won't," i said without trying, "that's not how ctrl p works. it's only going to print the screen i'm viewing."

i tried-- just for kicks-- and found myself to be correct and her to be an idiot. so i hung up.

the delivery man was growing impatient and my boss was losing his cool without any attempt to pretend otherwise. he was like an epileptic at a rave, or a unorganized trail of ants that had just been stepped on by a boot made of caffeine.

everything we tried failed. google chrome, internet explorer, safari, and firefox couldn't print our invoice. macs and pcs both failed. and speaking with the web support line was about as useful as speaking with a ham about the nature of pigs. i knew we were in trouble when she didn't know what i meant by "css coding."

"we do have this practice invoice from the morning," i said, "and, depending on your business ethics, we could counterfeit a new one. i mean, we do work at a print shop."

"you would need to fake the barcode as well," the delivery man said, "but if you could, that would work."

"oh there's a barcode generator online," one of the designers chimed in, "that's no problem."

"yeah, so no problem," i said, "we fake the barcode and then scan the rest so we can edit it to look like the actual invoice would look and we ship to singapore."

"it's not technically legal," the delivery man said, "but it would work. good thinking. you go to school for computers?"

"no," i said, "my counterfeiting knowledge comes from faking report cards."

but my boss wasn't comfortable sending a $10,000 order overseas with forged documents. i suppose i shouldn't have expected him to understand without having seen my counterfeiting resume.

and after all of our unorthodox ideas were deemed unsafe, we had no option but to call the fedex support line again. except, this time, we were given the direct number to our CONTACT at the company. she hooked us up with her best support agent and stayed on the line as a part of a non-sexual three-way.

i was a little bothered about being the one representing the print shop via phone because i'd been up since 6:30am and hadn't eaten. it was about 4pm when the call began, and i needed to run to the bank to cash my check before i could afford a lunch.

but i wasn't doing as badly as my boss. some people don't deal with chaos very well, and he's one of them. watching him panic while we tried to solve the problem was like watching a drunk dog discover a mirror. and he kept shouting useless things to me while i was trying to talk to the fedex team via phone, which didn't make things easier.

we got through it, though.

after an hour and a half, the support agent (nichole) had found a way to print our invoice. she then faxed it to herself, saved it as a pdf and emailed it to us to print.

she saved the day.

"thank you for being calm," my boss said to me, "i'm usually calm. i always know it'll work out. but we tried everything and i couldn't see a solution. i can't deal with that. so thank you for being collected."

"no problem," i said, "if i haven't said this before, i'll tell you now: when shit goes down and things get chaotic, i'm your man. that's when i do my best work."

i'm glad he got to see my super-power. but the truth was i'd only acted calm to keep things from getting worse. all of the actual solutions came from nichole: our support agent. all i did was talk to her in a relaxed voice, but she did the work; nichole saved the day.

and because of that, i made a point to say a few words before ending the call

"before i let you go," i said, "i know you get graded on your calls-- i heard the THIS CALL MAY BE MONITORED FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE PURPOSES message and i know what that means. but doesn't it suck that the q/a team never pulls the two-hour calls like this one? the ones where you make magic happen?"

"it's satisfying knowing you're happy," she laughed.

"well, i appreciate that," i said, "but it's not satisfying to me knowing that a good worker is only paid in satisfaction and not dollars."

"can you put on your supervisor," our fedex contact asked nichole.

she did.

"i just want to say nichole is a superb representative. she just solved problems in san francisco and singapore in one lengthy phone call. and she was friendly the entire time."

"we will certainly take note of this!" the supervisor said.

"also, i want to apologize."

"for what?" she asked.

"i want to apologize for not having a better vocabulary that would allow me to properly illustrate what an amazing experience nichole provided for me, my team here, and the clients in singapore. i wish i knew better words right now, but i don't. so i'm sorry."

complimenting our support agent instead of hanging up to run to the bank, cash my check, and have lunch felt 4x as good as leaving a positive comment on yelp. it's just one of those rare things that need to happen more often, but somehow don't.

that was the peace. i remember working at concierge extraordinaire and dealing with the q/a team. they would always pull my four-minute calls and grade them. and i'd always do moderately to horribly on paper. i'd say "um" more than zero times, or fail to say the client's last name three times in the call. little things. i didn't "expand and enhance" and whatnot. but in four-minutes, it's a given there was no expanding, or the call would've been longer and wouldn't have been pulled to grade.

the two-hour calls are the ones when you convince a lady that things will be okay even though her husband just died after fifty-three years of marriage. or the time you pull together a life-saving last-minute hotel reservation during the jfk floods. those calls are never pulled. they're too long to listen to.

but getting to know our fedex support agent received the praise she deserved made me feel okay about being shafted at the concierge job so many times over. maybe it didn't work out for me when i worked at a call-center, but it made me more aware of other call-centers and caused me to help it work out for someone else.

in fact, everything was glorious. the delivery man waited almost two hours without much complaint, the support lady was very supportive, the two palettes were sent to singapore properly, and i was commended for my ability smile in the face of chaos.

and that is pretty alright.

the end.