There are some times in life that you can’t win in.  Situations arise where the facts are always going to be against you either because of lies, or just dumb luck.  But even when you get knocked down you learn to thrive on the way back up.  That is what these lessons teach.  One annoying job brought about a bad day for me.   This day was all based on the failure of shipping materials and it was not my fault at all.  I worked at a car dealership and at the time was working in the parts department.  The job was simple and as a parts manager running the shipping, the department was a large portion of the organization.  This was a rather easy job and was mostly all about organization and creating processes to get parts in and out of our system and storage most efficiently. So on this day, a large part was supposed to be on our shipping truck. Dealing with delivery drivers was my morning routine. 

 Like normal the UPS diesel truck that was scheduled to arrive was on time and was going to be bringing lots of parts for high-end cars.  It was a racing car company and they were delivering some panels and tires which were of great expense.  The panel on this day was one of a thousand different parts that were on the truck for us. The driver backs the truck in and I started to unload the parts with the driver.  Most of our parts are either bare or are loaded in cardboard boxes for protection.  Large expensive parts are usually covered in a box and in this case, a forty thousand dollar part was on it for a Porchea.  Unknown to myself the part had actually punctured the package it was in. This meant that the part was sitting outside the cardboard box and exposed to everything else.  

This part was dragged, knocked, and bent.  This was unknown to all of us checking in the product and in the end, all the parts were checked in and I started to store them away.  It was not until a week later that the tear was found when the part was needed to be installed.  The panel had bent and the paint was chipped due to the part being exposed to the concrete and floor.  Since I was the person who had checked the product in I was responsible for it.  It was actually not myself who had put the product away and I was not aware of any damage.

The packaging did not save the part. This was not only a forty K loss for the store but the car was not able to be fixed until another one was shipped. So we had to eat the cost of the two weeks the racing car sat in our garage.  It was a sad situation and I was the only one blamed.  The parts failure was not my fault and I was told I would be fired for it.  After explaining the situation to my direct manager he was convinced that it was incompetence.  I simply told the store manager the exact story and he agreed with me that I did as any normal person would in the situation.  Make sure you insure shipping.