And It's Ending, One Minute At A Time

So yes. The rest of yesterday.

We finally managed to stop dancing around it and had a HUGE BLOODY ROW.

This might get a bit technical, bear with me.


About six months ago, one of the shipping lines we do business with started a new procedure. One of the many things we do here is ship various pieces of machinery. When the machinery is delivered to the docks, the shipping line would measure it, and charge us according to the measurements. To save much time and effort, they requested that for any machine we book, we provide a manufacturer's diagram with the booking. This makes sense; they're easy enough to obtain, and then we often ship the same types of machine week after week and so we would then only have to send the diagram once for each type of machine and it would save much costly man-hours of fucking about with measuring equipment.

I suggested, at this point, that we needed to keep a record of which machines we had sent diagrams for. The Boss, natch, said NO. I said, and I remember saying it very clearly, that this will be a really good thing to do, because if some issue should come up at a future stage, it will make it very easy for us to ascertain what's happening, whereas if we leave it for a few months and try to back-track it will be impossible. The Boss said NO THAT IS A WASTE OF TIME DO NOT DO IT. We had an argument about it at the time and the more persuasive, reasoned arguments I gave for keeping this data, the more she dug in and basically just told me not to be stupid.

So, naturally, yesterday we had an issue, a dispute with the shipping line of over the measurements of an item; a potentially very costly dispute. For the sake of a placeholder, let's call the machine in question an X1

The Boss : "Have we sent a diagram for an X1?"

Here's me, knowing it's all about to kick off : "I don't know."

The Boss : "WHY DO YOU NOT KNOW!??"

Here's me : "Because, if you recall -" and I quite tensely recount the conversation from six months ago during which I was told in no uncertain terms not to keep this information.

The Boss : "YOU SHOULD REMEMBER!"

Here's me : "We ship about thirty things like a month. This has been going on for six months. You expect me to remember which units I've shipped, by memory alone, out of a couple of hundred random serial numbers?"

The Boss : "YOU SHOULD BE TAKING NOTE OF THIS!"

Here's me : "As discussed a moment ago, you explicitly instructed me not to keep notes on this."

The Boss : "MENTAL NOTES!"

Here's me : "I CANNOT POSSIBLY DO THAT I WOULD HAVE HAD THIS INFORMATION IF YOU HAD LET ME BLOODY STORE IT!"

and so on, for quite some time. It got very heated and got to the stage where I had to leave the room and go for a cigarette lest I trail her down the street by the throat, and I returned, not much calmer but a little -

- and of course it all kicks off again. And I get to the stage where it's pointless arguing, and instead just end up saying things to the effect of "I cannot fucking believe that you cannot just turn round and say 'maybe you had a point there', I honestly cannot fucking believe that you are not capable of doing that when you are so very clearly totally fucking wrong."

And The Boss just continues to insist that firstly I should have programmed this information into my memory, and then further that I trawl through six months of e-mails to discover if this unit has previously had it's spec sheet sent. Which as it turns out, it hadn't, anyway.

And of course, therefore, we spent the rest of the day once again not speaking to each other in an atmosphere of utter, total bloody awfulness.

Total, utter fucking shite.