One of the most annoying days in my life was when I was almost fired for doing nothing wrong. This was unfortunate because in my State I am able to be fired at will for no reason or fault of my own. This day was all based on the failure of shipping materials and it was not my fault at all. I worked at a car dealership and at the time was working in the parts department. My job was to sometimes pick parts up and then go and catalog them into our system and get them ready to sell or be put on our service department cars. This was a rather easy job and was mostly all about organization and creating processes to get parts in and out of our system and storage most efficiently. So on this day, a large part was supposed to be on our shipping truck. This was where the whole day began.
It was a really nice morning on this regular Tuesday. The diesel truck that was scheduled to arrive was on time and was going to be bringing lots of parts for high-end cars. It was a racing car company and they were delivering some panels and tires which were of great expense. The panel on this day was one of 450 parts that were on the truck for us. The driver backs the truck in and I started to unload the parts with the driver. Most of our parts are either bare or are loaded in cardboard boxes for protection. Large expensive parts are usually covered in a box and in this case, a 29 thousand dollar panel for a racing car was set to be delivered. Unknown to myself the part had actually cut the box. This meant that the part was sitting outside the cardboard box.
What happened was that the driver had picked it up and it ended up dragging on the concrete floor. This was unknown to all of us checking in the product and in the end, all the parts were checked in and I started to store them away. It was not until a week later that the tear was found when the part was needed to be installed. The panel had bent and the paint was chipped due to the part being exposed to the concrete and floor. Since I was the person who had checked the product in I was responsible for it. It was actually not myself who had put the product away and I was not aware of anything but the product being in the store.
The paper product had failed to contain the panel and it ended up being damaged. This was not only a 29 thousand dollar loss for the store but the car was not able to be fixed until another one was shipped. So we had to eat the cost of the two weeks the racing car sat in our garage. It was a sad situation and I was the only one blamed. The parts failure was not my fault and I was told I would be fired for it. After explaining the situation to my direct manager he was convinced that it was incompetence. I simply told the store manager the exact story and he agreed with me that I did as any normal person would in the situation. This took a week and was stressful to get through and insurance ended up covering the loss.
