My last corporate job, I was a project coordinator for a major telecom company. Most of my business dealings were with salesmen who were trying to land their commission and weren't really worried about much of anything else. This is how things would usually go;
It's the 27th. All orders need to be in by the 25th to classify as EOM for the salesman's commission.
Order gets assigned to me. I move it to the back burner pile, because I already have four orders I need to key within the next few days.
Email from salesman: "Hey, do you have order numbers yet?" (literally recieved this order twenty minutes ago)
Email from me: "Can't get you order numbers, recieved after EOM cutoff. I've only had the order for 20 minutes."
Email from his boss, 2 hours later: "What's this I hear about you not being able to get order numbers for captain asshole?"
Email from me: "I recieved the order after EOM cutoff, and I've only had the order on my desk for... 2 and a half hours now. Even if I could get order numbers today, he sent me an incomplete order form (this happened 99% of the time - I had to track down the customer and get this information myself) and I'd be waiting on response from the customer to even begin keying this."
Email from his boss' boss, at the end of my workday, CC'd to my boss, my boss' boss, and the site manager: "Look, we sent the order in before the 30th, if you want to screw around with us and our customer, we can always take our business to another VoiP provider."
My face:
Another example:
Recieve order, 2nd of the month. Do my basic pre-scrub, send emails out to sales staff and customer requesting information.
Salesperson: "Please direct all communication to me on this order"
Me: "Acc. to FCC regulations and company policy I have to communicate with the customer on all steps of this order process if we don't have this form signed" *attach form to response*
Salesperson: "I've already sent that form"
*check my order, there's another form they've sent with a similair name that isn't even applicable to this order*
Me: "No, you sent
this form, when I need a different form." *attach the right form again*
The next day...
Salesperson, CC'd to my boss and his boss: "Here's the form, I don't appreciate being jerked around like this. Will I have order numbers by EOM?"
Me: "Certainly, it's only the 3rd, you should have them by the end of week if everything goes according to plan. If you could please get the following information from the customer..."
*follows is a five page long tech interview, that he should have performed before even submitting the order to me, that details things about where we're installing the voip, whether they want analog or digital, how many lines they need, how many numbers they need, etc*
One week later:
Me: "Hey salesperson, I sent you this sheet last week, I really need this information before I can get you order numbers"
Three days later:
Me: *Calling salesperson, not getting through*
Me, in email: "Hey, salesperson, I still need this sheet filled out before I can key this order! If I don't recieve this, I'm going to have to put the order on hold!"
Three days later:
Me: "I've had to put this order on hold due to lack of communication, please contact the customer as soon as possible to get this information for me."
A couple of weeks later, three days after the EOM cutoff, around the 28th:
Salesperson: "Hey! do you have order numbers for me yet? The customer wants to know when his service is getting hooked up!"
Me:
