Hero

“You’d better tell me what you know, toad,” said Tiffany. “Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.”

“Another world is colliding with this one,” said the toad. “There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.”

“Why?”

“There’s no one to stop them.”

There was silence for a moment.

“There’s me,” said Tiffany. 

The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett

---

It has, in many ways, been a frustrating couple of weeks. Problems keep springing upon me from dark corners: problems that I didn't cause and am powerless to fix.

The oil pressure light in my car keeps flickering whenever the engine idles. The car isn't leaking a drop (I checked) and I got the oil changed and did some basic repairs only a few weeks ago (and that was a story in itself) and there is, in actual fact, plenty of new, fresh oil in the engine (or wherever oil technically goes). But that little light keeps blinking with enough energy to cause an epileptic seizure, and as all drivers will know, a flickering oil light will haunt your nightmares.

My garage door opener has decided to stop working. It got a fresh battery only a couple of months ago, but every time I need to get in or out of the garage, it has taken more clicks of that little button to get it to move. I first resorted to clicking, then I unclipped the opener from my sun visor and held it up to the windshield, then I unrolled the window and stuck my arm out to click, then I got out of the car and walked up to the door and clicked like there was no tomorrow. Each of these escalating measures has worked for a few times, then faded away. The door may be building up an immunity. We've reached the point where I have to turn off my car, get out, open the other door with the keypad (the other garage door is the only one rigged for keypad-opening), walk across the garage to the button by the kitchen door, close the one door, open the other, get back in my car, turn it on, drive it in, turn it off, get out of the car and close the garage. Ah, technology.

And though we are now in mid-December, it simply refuses to snow. Nothing but gray grass and gray sky as far as the eye can see.

But the most frustrating has been at work. My job, for those of you who don't know, involves getting stuff shipped from the US to the UK. As long as I've been doing this job, box after box has just disappeared en route. Over months of investigation, I unraveled the problem: somewhere along the line, our boxes are getting shipping labels slapped on them with the wrong postal code. It's hard to deliver a box if the address says Sheffield but the postal code says Leeds.

So while the UK customers have patiently and cheerfully waited, sometimes for months, to get their stuff (bless these good people. They are truly the inventors of the Stiff Upper Lip), my team and I have sent and re-sent one box after another, and watched each one via online tracker as they sail from California to Florida, Florida to London, London to Massachusetts, Massachusetts to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Alberta, Alberta to Sheffield, Sheffield to London, London back to Massachusetts, and then stop dead.

Needless to say, it's a little frustrating.

We told management that something was wrong.

"Submit an issue form about it," they said.

An issue form is the automated form we're supposed to use for any problems we can't handle ourselves. Issue forms produce one of four results: 1. no response at all; 2. an obvious response that you have already tried because you're not an idiot; 3. an outdated response that used to work but does not anymore; 4. a response so ludicrously stupid that we print them out and hang them on the wall. Gems have included "You can't track this package through FedEx because it was shipped via SmartPost" (SmartPost is a FedEx service, and it's what nearly all our US orders use); "Did you try re-syncing the account?" (The original problem contained the words 'I have re-synced the account and it didn't help'); "What do you want me to do about it?" (Nothing, I guess . . . that's why I told you about it, so you wouldn't do anything); and, my favorite of all, "You need to submit an issue form for this problem." (Whaa? This is an issue form! This thing you're writing on right now is an issue form! Is there some special magical issue form I'm supposed to be using instead?)

So we submitted issue forms, saying our packages were misdirected. No answer.

I inquired of management again.

The response: "Did you submit an issue form?"

"Yes, a few," said I.

"We'll look into it," said they.

Several days later:

"What did you find out?" said I.

"Oh, that. DHL sometimes gets out of sync, and get one label on the top of the box and a different one on the side. Just keep sending replacements."

I sighed.

I tried to talk to DHL agents to see if they could intercept specific boxes and get the incorrect label scribbled out or something. I got an automated system every time. When I finally spoke to someone, he couldn't get anything to show up with the tracking numbers I had. I sighed again, thanked him, and sent a replacement box.

So a steady stream of boxes poured into this black hole of missing mail. After a while, we stopped submitting issue forms and just sent the boxes anyway. Re-sent boxes got lost. Their replacements got lost. One poor woman ordered maternity clothes back in September; she's due any minute, and not a stitch of clothing has she received.

Finally a customer sent me a photograph showing clearly the WRONG POSTCODE printed on the box, bold as brass. Out-of-sync labels, my foot.

I took it to management.

"Did you submit an issue form?" said they.

"Several," said I.

"Well, we fix problems based on how many issue forms get submitted. Problems with the most forms about them get fixed first. I'm sorry, but it's going to be a while."

We started submitting the forms again. With vigor. I got out my records of re-sent orders and submitted issue forms by the dozen, chronicling the back-log of problems. And while waiting for a response, we kept re-sending boxes.

Then, a breakthrough. A customer, who actually works for DHL, called us. Through his useful information, we were able to track one of our packages. Yodel, the company that handles home delivery, received the box with the wrong postcode on it. DHL, whom we thought for months was the cause of all this mess, received the box with the wrong post code on it.

It was like that moment in the horror movie where the heroine realizes that the phone call is coming from inside the house.

Something in our system is causing this. Something that we are responsible for and can fix.

I went back to management.

"I'm only one person," said management, shrugging.

I knifed him to death and hid him in a closet.

Artist's Rendition.

No, scratch that last part. That's not what I did.

What I did was go back to my desk and eat a Reese's peanut butter cup and have a think.

I had by now brought this problem to five different layers of management. If I went any higher to solve the problem, I'd be talking to Bishop Burton. Above him, I'd be talking to President Monson. 'Up' was obviously the wrong way to go to get these things fixed.

However, we lowly agents are forbidden to go sideways. We've been carefully instructed NOT to call the nice sister in Germany who can take care of returns, no problem. Under no circumstances are we to shoot an e-mail to the efficient sister who handles credit card disputes. Under pain of death, we must not contact the warehouse team that will happily fix orders that are going to the wrong address. And don't even think about looking up the person who can print magazine subscriber lists—she'd love to get that to you right away, but that's not the point. There are proper channels.

Proper channels so clogged with beurocratic cholesterol that we're about one sneeze away from a corporate heart attack.

So I stayed after work today. I looked up the contact information for the head of the warehouse, and I wrote him an e-mail. In the e-mail, I explained the problem we'd been seeing. I laid out the research that we'd done, and clarified the conclusions we'd drawn. I asked him most politely to look at the boxes going out his warehouse door to see if they had the right addresses, and begged most humbly that if the addresses were wrong, would he please, please find out why? Maybe even prevent them from happening anymore?

Then I clicked send.

I have overstepped the bounds of my job. I'm a little afraid of what I'll find when I go to work tonight. Maybe I'll get an e-mail saying "Oh, thanks! I checked on that, and looks like it was a simple mix-up that I've got fixed now. Merry Christmas!" Perhaps I will get promoted to Chief Problem-Solver and get a pay raise made of all the money we're no longer using to re-send things to England. Perhaps I will get a cake. Maybe I'll even get a name plaque to put on my cubicle.

But then again, maybe I'll get called into Claudio's office to get the lecture, "This really wasn't something you should have been doing. It is not your job to solve problems." (I've had a manager say this to me, by the way. Word for word. I was so angry I started crying, since the knife-and-closet plan was unavailable due to lack of either closet or knife.) "You were very unprofessional. You need to behave yourself from now on or we're going to have to let you go."

Of course, I know in my heart that the most likely outcome is that I'll get a 'Thanks, we'll look into that' e-mail and never hear about it again. But just for today, before the future takes form . . . just for today, I've taken a risk to accomplish something meaningful for the sake of other people who need help. Just for today, I am a hero.

And when I left work, it was snowing.

---

*And the oil light didn't come on and the garage door opened and they were playing 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' on the radio.

*Gratitude to Scott Adams for Alice and the Fist of Death. If it weren't for you, sir, Management would be the highest-fatality job category in America.