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amyisherenowitsokay · 14 days ago

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This is random as fuck but i love the Suez Canal meme shit because at the time, I was working for a glorified drop-shipping company masquerading as a customization/swag branding company, and it was a genuinely hilarious, surreal, and giddy experience to answer phones (i was both customer service and customization specialist because I was the only one willing to listen to our vendors explain how their jobs worked, and tell people 'no you can't embroider at less than 1/4" tall letters and still be legible, yes I know you can PRINT smaller than that but that's PAPER and INK and this is THREAD and that's not how that works') and be like "hey sorry no we can't do that, we don't have that item in stock"

and they'd be like "okay well you're the fucking fifth assholes I've called to tell me that, what the fuck is wrong with all of you, don't you keep track of your inventory????"

and i'd physically bounce in my chair and get to go "so have you heard of the Ever Given?" and hear "What the fuck does the Ever Given have to do with my undyed cotton sweatpants that I need to make tie-dye bullshit on etsy????"

And in their foolishness, they activated my trap card, where I held them hostage for the next 10 minutes explaining precisely what the Ever Given has to do with their shitty etsy store and the collapse of every indie tie-dyer in the fuckin nation, apparently

So all of the actual manufacturers we worked with and who who actually had warehouses with product in them had trackers on their boats, and we were in contact with them daily for updates on what was going on . All of the boats with the inventory everyone was looking for were stuck behind the Ever Given. Like to the point we were almost sure what position in 'line' they were behind this fuckin boat. My manager and I would spend our downtime when we were at the edge of our rope fielding calls about inventory trying to figure out if we could see 'our' boats in the published satellite images or on the news. I would also play this game with the vendors, because we were all going insane fielding calls about this one specific item that I'll tell you about now

For those of you unfamiliar with larger scale inventory, all shipments are ordered basically 3 months ahead of time, meaning items for Fall for example began production in early Summer, and delivery windows to warehouses were expected just before Fall, like say the end of August, to be sorted and ready for shipping out by the time projected orders were expected to roll in.

But since the ETA for these ships to dock and unload product was, for example, the 30th, they and hundreds of other ships missed their delivery window, and ports were a mess trying to shove in the now-late ships for docking, and i learned so much about how boats and deliveries work because for 8 fucking months after the Ever Given fiasco began, a chain-shock reaction of white undyed cotton sweatpants were basically unavailable for months, and when we did get them in stock, they were gone within basically minutes of us announcing we had them, and people were hounding us literally daily for these fucking specific sweatpants that were apparently ideal for tie-dying. Dozens of people. An absurd amount of people, sometimes multiple times a day. Every other call, if not every call, was about these sweatpants. I was getting offers to Venmo me, personally, $100 or more if I was willing to bump them on the waitlist. I didn't, because 1) that's insane, 2) I wasn't the purchaser for the company anyways, and 3) the bribers were usually mean to me and I didn't believe they'd really give me and let me keep the money. (The ones who were nice to me regardless of being told 'no, we don't have them, and the waitlist currently has 54 people' though did get calls notifying them when items came in, because I was too busy to write emails, and if you placed the order with me on the phone, protocol meant I notified our purchaser directly, and she was too slammed to keep track of the waitlist, and would usually just bump that person to the front of the line and couldn't be fucked to keep track in her head of who was ACTUALLY next.)

Anyways you also activated my trap card listening to this, hope you enjoyed. Miss you Ever Given, you made 8 months of my life hell and I'll never forget the Jerzees white 100% cotton undyed sweatpants shortage of '21.

Also if you ever want to embroider a logo on a hat, make sure your text isn't smaller than your pinky finger. Mwa mwa mwa kisses

a collection of my favorite tweets regarding the Ever Given in the Suez Canal

#amyisherenow #just saying shit #enjoy my lore #also for some fucking reason everyone specifically wanted MEDIUMS #XS or XL were also the only ships that somehow made it to port though #so one time i answered the phone and this lady greeted me with "I dont want XS and i dont want XL #do you have ANY OTHER SIZE?'#in the most battle-weary tone ive ever heard #and without either of us ever specifying what we were talking about i was just immediately like 'yeah we dont have mediums sorry'#and she paused a really long time and then #was like wait #i didnt even tell you what i was calling about #how did u know #and i said 'ur the 5th caller in a row calling me about these and we only have been open for 20 minutes'#i hated that job but by god were the stories insane

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