Take one for the team!

Sometimes, being a broker is like being a contestant in a relay race, except the broker is almost always the last person who gets the baton. My analogy comes from those super-hot last minute, do-or-die shipments that need to be cleared right away so the shipment can delivered two hundred miles away the next morning.

This relay race becomes a real drag when the shipment arrives in the non-traditional office hours. Say there is a hot shipment of film equipment arriving from Europe that is required for filming a sporting event, but the people who shipped the goods took their time and the goods arrive here 5PM the night before for the event that will take place on the following morning at 8 AM. Better yet, this is a Carnet shipment where the hapless broker has to go to the airline at 8 PM to pick up the documents, return to the office to prepare the entry, and go back to customs to get the entry released (if Customs is in a good mood that night), and run the documents to the trucking company to get the freight picked up so the freight can arrive on time at the event next morning. Because you know without the shipment, someone is going to have a cardiac arrest and die!!?

This is the part that pisses me off about being in the end of the relay race. It is as if the first few people of the relay race took their time, and got really behind. So the lucky broker, being almost at the end of the relay, has to make up for the lost time by running at warp speed-- doing so often means working nights and weekends if the freight arrived late or on a weekend.

Then, why is this about "taking one for the team"? Because the owners and upper management of a custom brokerage will always never be the one driving to the airline 8 PM on a Friday night to pick up the carnet, because the owners and the upper management will always never be the one going to customs at 7 am on a Sunday morning, imploring the customs officer to release the"hot item". I might add that most of these brokers working these extra, odd hours are on salary (of course).

Then why do we do this? Because we love our customer so much? I don't think so. Because we are afraid of disappointing our customers? maybe. It's really about keeping our customers-- so they think they are special and keep coming back for more special service, and making our customers happy consequently making our bosses happy. Who lost minutes of valuable time that he or she will never get back, ever? the broker, of course. It's all about taking one for the team...