Friday, October 27, 2006

WTH Conversations Part III

My company has sold a very expensive peice of machinery to a company in Eastern Europe. We are sending three Chinese engineers there to assemble the machine for the European company. The following series of conversations regarding the travel plans of the engineers nearly caused my head to pop like a giant zit.

Act 1-
Me: "Please check the email that I just sent you. I found a flight on Saturday for the engineers to take and have given you all of the details. Make the booking today on the phone. After we have the visas, send some of our Beijing staff to their office to pay for the tickets in cash."
RPIMA (begins with Royal...): "Ok, no problem. I will inform you when it is done."

Act 2-
Me: "I never heard from you yesterday. Do we have the tickets?"
RPIMA: "Yes, we have booked them. On Friday we will know if we have the visas. If we do, we will purchase the tickets with cash."
Me: "Sounds good, thank you."

Act 3-
Me: "Good news. We were granted the visas. Please purchase the tickets we booked."
RPIMA: "There are no more tickets on Saturday."
Me: "But we had reservations (Seinfield, anyone?)"
RPIMA: "Well, we did not reserve those tickets from Aeroflot."
Me: "What? Why not. That was very important. (The other company) has spent a lot of money based on our arrival on Saturday."
RPIMA: "Well, you know, (Chinese president of the company)'s cousin is a travel agent in Beijing. We wanted to give him the business so we called him and asked about the tickets."
Me: "Ok, then what about the ticket he reserved?"
RPIMA: "Well, he only gave us a quotation on the phone, he did not make an actual reservation."
Me: "Ok, lets call the airline he quoted. Which airline is it?"
RPIMA: "He doesn't know."
Me: "He doesn't know? How was he going to purchase the tickets for us if he doesn't know what company it is?"
RPIMA: "Well, maybe he has a friend who would buy them."
Me: "You mean, he isn't the travel agent? What, he just was going to make some money from this and pay the real travel agent?"
RPIMA: "Sorry, he doesn't know."
Me: "I don't understand how I could have been more clear as to what I wanted done. I gave the exact details of the flight. This was very important and a late arrival is going to cost the other company lots of money. Now, I have to deal with a very angry woman yelling at me on the phone because her boss is yelling at her! FIX THIS!!!"

POP goes my head!! And I wonder why I am balding at 25...