Day Two In Hell

Corporate Travel: "We never pre-pay hotels. You have to pay for it, and submit for reimbursement."

Me: "Ok, so who paid for my airfare?"

CT: "You did. We used the same credit card you gave us for your hotel reservation."

Me: "Um, I did not arrange any of this. Someone there did. I've never given anyone my credit card. So whose credit card did you use?"

CT: "I honestly don't know. You'll need to speak to someone else. There's nothing I can do for you."

So I make a call to my own office, and they make the arrangements to pay for my room. I have to deal with my bank to get the hotel charge reversed fast. The good news is that it's only a hold on my account, they haven't actually drained it dry. But it may be two or three days for it to "unhold."

The warehouse is a disaster. One quarter of the items in any location don't show in the computer. This is offset by the one quarter of the items in the computer not being in the location. And since the new system uses unique ID numbers for everything, about one half of the items are also wrong. Clearly, the computer inventory does not match reality. And there doesn't seem to be any clear decisions made on how to fix this, or if it should even be fixed.

And my travel partner doesn't seem to be interested it getting our travel schedule to match our work schedule. "We should probably come in Saturday." Translate: "We'll ignore the fact that everyone around us is planning to run out of town as fast as they can Friday morning. We'll just not question this and stay overtime."

We spent most of the day tagging boxes, until we ran out of tags. The warehouse was provided with one ribbon and one roll of tags for their new printer, which was not nearly enough. Spent most of the afternoon typing emails I can't send.

Dinner was good. But when we asked the waitress for separate checks, all she did was divide the bill by three. I end up paying about $8 more for my dinner than I should.

Did I mention that I now have $24 left in my bank account for the next three days?