So of course, it's busy as hell yesterday at work. We are four people down, and everyone has a problem, or wants to book a $75.00 shipment. Calls are in cue, even the supervisors are on the phone.

On Mondays after 2100, I'm there by myself. I start entering a quote for Isuzu and the computer gives me this useful message: 'Quantity Error'. The only problem is, it doesn't tell me what quanity is wrong. Nothing is highlighted on my screen. But I know it's a mistake on our contact/commodity entry screen somewhere because the system won't go past that screen. I essentially end up erasing all the fields and start again. The windows talk box comes up again, 'Quanity Error'. I try again. And again. And again. I finally switch back to the old system which I am not supposed to do and it takes me less than two minutes to do the booking that is paying a whopping $135.00. The amount of time it took me just to process the work, probably cut out all of our margin.

I did some investigating about the error message system and talked to a friend mine who works in our sister department 'Customer Solutions' and is also a programmer/database administrator on the side. She tells me that the programmers decided since we are so well paid they don't need to have detailed error messages. We should be smart enough to figure it out ourselves. Now that's some good logic there....NOT. She doesn't have a problem with that, but most of us do.

Firstly, my job revolves around getting customers on and off the phone very quickly and making the sale. We are Inside Sales Assistants, not customer service. We sell. Customers don't want to wait for an answer. Our company literally has hundreds of competitors both integrators and forwarders. If you can't give them an answer quickly, someone else can and will.

The biggest thing I thought we always had going for us was our superior customer service. But now with this new system that is greatly being affected. In fact, everyone is slower on this new system.

We received word that we lost 20 million dollars last quarter. Our new owner is not happy...at all. Our stock has been downgraded already. Managment blamed it on all kinds of things including a reorganization of the sales department. But, my bet is, the biggest part of the loss is from this new quote entry system that doesn't work properly.

But hey, what do I know, I'm just a pee-on, not a programmer.