how dumb am I?

I'm so dumb, I spent much of today panicking, trying to figure out how I could possible ship out a job by tomorrow that hadn't been painted yet. a job that wasn't due to ship for NEARLY TWO WEEKS.

there are several processes involved for my job. I plumb forgot one today.

I am essentially a production manager. I get to delegate labour to roughly ten shop guys. the sales staff goes through me to find out what can be done. I, in turn, work with purchasing and engineering to get them their lead times.

couple months ago, we get a purchase order. job would normally have, say, an eight week lead time. but it needs to go through engineering. engineering normally has the job for two weeks, which is included in the original figure. they sign off on the job, and planning begins. parts are ordered and labour is scheduled accordingly to meet the ship date. problem is, engineering almost always takes longer to hold up their end of the bargain. so between the engineering and planning steps, I reset the lead time. in this case, I pushed the ship date back ten days.

problem is, I forgot to change the date on my schedule. so all this time, I've been acting on the assumption that the job had to shipby tomorrow. amazingly enough, I almost pulled it off. it went to paint friday, due back today, goes to crate tuesday and gets shipped. except the painters dropped the ball. they didn't paint the unit. it won't be done until tomorrow afternoon.

which meant my buyer was going to scramble to get the unit from paint at 1pm (they won't start it until tomorrow morning) to the craters, which is a 45 minute drive, in order for us to have a chance to ship tomorrow night. it also meant the paint was going to look like shit, since it wouldn't have time to dry properly.

as we're going over the gameplan tonight, I notice the correct ship date. and then had to make about four phone calls telling everyone to disregard my rambling, that I'm an idiot. as it turns out, the damn thing will go a week early, and everyone will be happy.

except me. I feel like an ass.