10+2

Just what is 10+2 filing?

A HUGE BLOODY ROW, is what it is.

Unable to get anything approaching sense or information from The Boss, I made some enquiries. The enquiries I made led to me making an utter dick out of myself, which is not the sort of thing that I really enjoy. Occasional bollockings from customers are par for the course but bollockings from the United States Customs And Border Protection Agency are frankly no fucking fun whatsoever.

10+2 filing is yet another part of the ongoing system of mind-melting bureaucracy very stringent security requirements from US Customs. To spell this out for you, the United States is the single most complicated country in the world to ship anything into, by a long stretch. Complicated, difficult, and immensely powerful in this sense - the US reserve the right to turn an entire ship out of it's coastal waters if there's a single piece of cargo in a single container on board that hasn't had every necessary document completed in good order. No-one is really mad keen to be the person who costs a shipping line a few million because they didn't send the right number of copies of the right forms, hey what? A quiet word with a chap I'm friendly with on the far side told me the bones of what I need to know, or more specifically what I needed to know about a year ago. This system can into place in January 2009 but no penalties were being issued for a grace period of one year from then, from which point on the intention of the powers that be is to hammer the life out of any transgressor, both with fines and an attempt to physically bury the guilty party in paperwork.

As with nearly every piece of new legislation in the freight industry this century, if you ask anyone "but why?" the answer is generally the short and far from simple : "Nine-eleven.". The global transport industry has taken nine years just to decide what forms need to be filled in as a result, think about that in your own time if you want to.

Anyway, I digress. It won't happen again, in fact I didn't really want it to happen at all but hey. Exports to the United States more or less account for our existence here in this company, and as such You Do Not Fuck About With Them.

I can't even type this out in a funny or amusing way, I'm trying to put a spin on it but it's not happening; basically, all the rules just changed and the World has had a year to get used to it, and I didn't know. Why didn't I know? Because, quite simply, we are a fucking shambles. We may be doing ok financially but in terms of being organized we are an utter fucking bollocks.

Three days of trying to understand while playing some sort of weird, inverted game of cat and mouse over the whole fucking thing.

Here's me : "So wait, do you actually understand this stuff?"

The Boss : "You should."

Here's me : "Well I only fucking found about it last week, I mean when the fuck did you find out?"

The Boss : "I told you about this."

Here's me : "Bollocks. Fucking. Bull. Fucking. Shit."

That's not a verbatim conversation because I've forgotten the details of this three-day-long-argument and the above is certainly toned down but suffice to say we both absolutely lost the fucking plot and our respective rags and as this is just too bloody serious to let go head office have become involved and we have both been summoned to go to a meeting with the upper echelons, which promises to be interesting I'm sure. Having to fly back home together afterwards should be a fucking riot, apart from anything else. This is very fucking serious indeed and I am not going down for this utterly fucking calamitous fuck-up.

I don't think I've managed to convey what's happening at all, but so much of it is technical and the conversations around it were disastrous. By coincidence or whatever I ended up getting sick and took a few days off to recover, during which I still managed to have arguments with The Boss via telephone while I was lying there in bed, and these are not our usual to-and-fro stuff, it's been full on bloody warfare. So something may happen in the not-too-distant and what that all means I can't even really think because I'm still not feeling the best and I'm stressed to the fucking neck over the whole thing. More news as it breaks.