Graham Sutherland / PolynomialNov 17
my wife just reminded me of a very funny story. I ordered a bench PSU from one of the big electronics suppliers and when the box arrived only the power cable was in there, no bench PSU. so I called them up, the warehouse guy was able to confirm the shipping weight was way off, and we ended up chatting about funny shipping errors. one of their newbies had once gone to a shelf, it was empty, so assumed the shelf itself was the item and shipped it out. but that wasn't the funniest one.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialNov 17

their warehouse picking system was descended from an old mainframe greenscreen app. the kind where you have a terminal connection and you have to put text in the different fields. when they upgraded with new systems it all tied into that same old backend, parsing the fields from their known positions in the terminal output.

this occasionally causes interesting problems. most spectacularly when someone ordered a large reel of solder and something overflowed a text field shifting everything down.

Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialNov 17

this resulted in the item price being parsed as the quantity.

the customer phoned them up when a haulage company unexpectedly arrived carrying an entire euro pallet of solder.

with a waybill saying that this was delivery *one of three*.

they didn't have enough stock at the main warehouse, so the system had sent a request out for another two trucks to bring more pallets of solder from their EU warehouses.

Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialNov 17
they frantically called up the haulage firm and got them to call the drivers and turn the trucks around. pricey error but could've been much worse!
Show threadAnton PiatekNov 17
@gsuberland I've seen a single hard drive shipped on a pallet because of fun shipping systems. A colleague once had a piece of paper strapped to a pallet as they couldn't just post a hardware licence key, it had to be shipped as freight!
Show threadjuhNov 18
@sldrant @gsuberland We regularly get specials like "one soic-16 on a pallet" and "one dimm in a box for 50 in a box that's 90% bubble wrap in a box that's a cubic meter. on a pallet"
Show threaddmi 💽
@juh @sldrant @gsuberland this is amazing, how does that even happen lmao
Nov 18 at 8:43amWeb
Show threadAnton PiatekNov 18
@domi @gsuberland @juh when you only have one box size in the system, and the computer says everything goes on a pallet...