Friday the 13th of July, 2012 tried to kick my ass.
Key word: TRIED.
Friday the 13th has always been a lucky day for me. In fact, the number 13 has always been a lucky number for me. So I didn't give a second thought to the fact that today was Friday the 13th, and went in to work with the expectation that it would be a great day to end the long work week.
I could not have been more WRONG!
The day started off just fine. The courier team was having to use our larger box truck, named Betty, because the brakes had shot craps on Wilma just two days before. She has a bit of a hard down shift when going from 2nd back into first gear, but has otherwise been the prefered and better truck. Volumes were a bit heavy for a Friday morning, but the file pull volumes looked tame compared to the previous day's asset sale hard file rush. We had pulled over 800 files on Thursday, and today's volumes were looking like a cake walk comparitively. We even had extra time to have staff members sit and sort out the paid documnet refile volumes.
But the calm morning turned into a hurricane of activity just shortly before lunch. I was down in another department, checking on our delivery volumes from that group for the afternoon, when I got a phone call from my driver on the AM courier run. Wilma's brakes had just given out, and they were parked in the parkinglot between the Walgreen's and Steak-n-Shake at the intersection of HWY N and K.
I immediately went into evaluation and recovery mode, and went looking for my other courier drivers to send out Pebbles (our vehicle of last resort) for a rescue run. When i got back to the dock office, Brad (my acting unit manager) was already asking for volunteers for two drivers to take Pebbles to the site to transfer boxes from Betty to the smaller van sized truck, and a chase car to transport the three people who had been on the AM courier run. We now had 6 people out of the building to adress the fiasco that had become of the morning courier run.
If it weren't bad enough trying to adress this situation, I still had three teams to maintain work flow for. We still do not have a new Unit Manager in our group, my fellow team lead was out on vacation as was our other Unit Manager for Records Management. It was crash or fly time, and I knew I had to use this opportunity to soar above the clouds. This is exactly the kind of scenario that I have always excelled at demonstrating my skills as a leader and asset to the business, and I finally had another chance to prove it.
While maintaining what could be salvaged from a daily Business As Usual (BAU) work flow with the teams on the production floor, I spent the rest of the day calling to schedule a tow truck, trying to get GE Fleet Services to expedite our repair approval for the truck already in the shop, calling the repair shop to confirm the estimates to completely re-do the brakes on Wilma, scheduling for a rental truck from Penske Truck Rentals in Earth City, coordinating with the mail services work group to shuttle one of my drivers and their deliveries back and forth between our building and Progress Point, and driving half way across town to meet the tow truck driver after making sure that my vehicle was secured and locked to protect the equipment that we had to leave in her box...
I was so on top of things this afternoon, that after the first hour or so, when I had ressured them that we would not miss any delivery deadlines or SLA's (Service Level Agreements), and that I was already planning ahead for Monday, management stopped hovering or even asking what status we were at with each of the items at hand.
By the time I left for the day (20 some odd phone calls later) at 6:03 PM, I was shot and ready to go home and veg out. But, as crazy as the whole situation had seemed, it was a great exercise in demonstrating my abilities to manage this team effectively and efficiantly; and I did so while minimizing and managing the risk factors to the business. it was a dark and stormy afternoon, but it was also a chance for me to sine and show my management team how well I can manage adversity.
Friday the 13th has always been a lucky day for me. In fact, the number 13 has always been a lucky number for me. So I didn't give a second thought to the fact that today was Friday the 13th, and went in to work with the expectation that it would be a great day to end the long work week.
I could not have been more WRONG!
The day started off just fine. The courier team was having to use our larger box truck, named Betty, because the brakes had shot craps on Wilma just two days before. She has a bit of a hard down shift when going from 2nd back into first gear, but has otherwise been the prefered and better truck. Volumes were a bit heavy for a Friday morning, but the file pull volumes looked tame compared to the previous day's asset sale hard file rush. We had pulled over 800 files on Thursday, and today's volumes were looking like a cake walk comparitively. We even had extra time to have staff members sit and sort out the paid documnet refile volumes.
But the calm morning turned into a hurricane of activity just shortly before lunch. I was down in another department, checking on our delivery volumes from that group for the afternoon, when I got a phone call from my driver on the AM courier run. Wilma's brakes had just given out, and they were parked in the parkinglot between the Walgreen's and Steak-n-Shake at the intersection of HWY N and K.
I immediately went into evaluation and recovery mode, and went looking for my other courier drivers to send out Pebbles (our vehicle of last resort) for a rescue run. When i got back to the dock office, Brad (my acting unit manager) was already asking for volunteers for two drivers to take Pebbles to the site to transfer boxes from Betty to the smaller van sized truck, and a chase car to transport the three people who had been on the AM courier run. We now had 6 people out of the building to adress the fiasco that had become of the morning courier run.
If it weren't bad enough trying to adress this situation, I still had three teams to maintain work flow for. We still do not have a new Unit Manager in our group, my fellow team lead was out on vacation as was our other Unit Manager for Records Management. It was crash or fly time, and I knew I had to use this opportunity to soar above the clouds. This is exactly the kind of scenario that I have always excelled at demonstrating my skills as a leader and asset to the business, and I finally had another chance to prove it.
While maintaining what could be salvaged from a daily Business As Usual (BAU) work flow with the teams on the production floor, I spent the rest of the day calling to schedule a tow truck, trying to get GE Fleet Services to expedite our repair approval for the truck already in the shop, calling the repair shop to confirm the estimates to completely re-do the brakes on Wilma, scheduling for a rental truck from Penske Truck Rentals in Earth City, coordinating with the mail services work group to shuttle one of my drivers and their deliveries back and forth between our building and Progress Point, and driving half way across town to meet the tow truck driver after making sure that my vehicle was secured and locked to protect the equipment that we had to leave in her box...
I was so on top of things this afternoon, that after the first hour or so, when I had ressured them that we would not miss any delivery deadlines or SLA's (Service Level Agreements), and that I was already planning ahead for Monday, management stopped hovering or even asking what status we were at with each of the items at hand.
By the time I left for the day (20 some odd phone calls later) at 6:03 PM, I was shot and ready to go home and veg out. But, as crazy as the whole situation had seemed, it was a great exercise in demonstrating my abilities to manage this team effectively and efficiantly; and I did so while minimizing and managing the risk factors to the business. it was a dark and stormy afternoon, but it was also a chance for me to sine and show my management team how well I can manage adversity.