Record Cold in North Texas
Living in North Central Texas, we take a lot of things for granted. Mild winters with little or no snow. An ice storm here and there but it’s usually warm enough the next day to take it all away. Enter one for the record books…..It hasn’t been above freezing since last Tuesday. Wednesday brought a round of emergency power outages initiated by ERCOT (Electrical Reliability Council of Texas). We had 4 outages between 6:00 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. and were asked to conserve to prevent another round on Thursday. Several suppliers in the DFW area were closed for multiple days.
Tuesday was to be a grand day. A much anticipated order of laser appliqued and distressed screen printed hooded jackets (22 boxes) was due to arrive – 4 showed up! On Thursday, 12 more appeared. During this time a backorder shipped from the east coast and 5 more boxes were to be delivered today. Didn’t happen. Now I have 11 boxes sitting on UPS trucks because of the weather.
Super Bowl 45
As most everyone knows (of course not everyone is a football fan) Arlington, TX is hosting Super Bowl 45 on Sunday. Last September, the official NFL Super Bowl Football supplier announced that we could pre-order footballs. Most balls would be available in December. You could have the team names on them but they wouldn’t be available until after 1/26/11. I placed my order. The supplier shipped my order on 1/28, it arrived in DFW on 2/1 and is still setting on a truck. I think it was probably on one of the Fedex trucks I saw almost hanging off of a rail at the top of the the High 5!
Overnight isn’t really Overnight
In a storm like this in our area, “overnight” is “overweek” +. A client needed a rush order. The overnight shipping was going be be around $50 (which the suppler would gladly bill) but my experience this week told me that paying for overnight was a waste of money considering it wouldn’t be delivered until at least Monday, so we went with second day for delivery on Monday. We’ll see what Monday brings but I sure hope it’s above freezing long enough to clear the roads. I also have a “rush” order sitting in Grand Prairie waiting for pickup!
The purpose of this post?
No matter what you take on yourself or ask of others, Mother Nature can always toss in the proverbial “monkey wrench” so you just have to sit back and let it pass. I jump through hoops for my clients on a regular basis because I appreciate them and want them to feel the “luv”. It’s very hard for me to tell a customer (okay, some customers not so hard) I can’t or won’t do something but I have to keep a close watch to be sure that I don’t set myself or the client up for failure. I try to under promise and over deliver but there are so many pieces of the order process over which I have no control. Such is the weather we’ve had this week in Dallas/Ft. Worth and Houston too!
I’ve watched more news this week than normal and there is a lot of Super Bowl hype on the tube. I hear people talking about not bringing a Super Bowl back to “Jerry’s World” because of the weather. With that attitude, don’t be surprised if there is a freak snow storm in New Orleans, Arizona or Miami some year! And, I’m sure there won’t be any cold, bad weather in Indianapolis (2012) or New Jersey (2014). Just because you don’t expect it, doesn’t mean it can’t happen!