So today at 9.30 AM the phone rings. It's a delivery driver, who has a couple of hundred items for our second site. I explain the situation. He asks if I can take delivery at the main site instead, and I have to tell him no - we have no access to the labs, nowhere else to store the goods for six weeks, and in any case it isn't where we want the bloody things - which incidentally weigh at least sixty kilos including 10kg of 100g weight sets, a load of G-clamps, loads of glassware, and seventy ammeters, voltmeters, and multimeters.
So eventually he concedes defeat and says he'll take the stuff back to the depot, and I call the company that sent the goods. The moron who answers is convinced that because I said we couldn't take delivery there, we must be able to take delivery somewhere else. Wrong...
Eventually I got it sorted, and then had to phone all of the other companies to make sure nobody else was mixed up. Good thing I did, because one other had the delivery date wrong, another had the date right but was ready to ship to the wrong site. If nothing else goes wrong and everything gets to the right place at the right time it will be a minor miracle.
Sometimes I think I earn my pay...