Careful what you wish for

In the first 10 days of my internship I had done a lot of lists and research. I understand the importance of lists and research in making informed decisions but I yearned for more responsibilities and more challenging tasks. On my 10th-15^th day my roles and responsibilities were greatly increased, and as was the pressure. For those of you who haven’t experienced what it is like in a consultancy and the large amounts of pressure some people are under check through this PR blog here.

On my 12^th day when I arrived at the office I have received hundreds of new emails from different staff members outlining my new responsibilities and what was expected. I was now in charge of creating the list for the weekly WIP and creating the staff movements each week. I was also now in charge of a few client tasks.

The most stressful of these was organising freighting. This task was the most stressful as the deadline was tight, the logistics were complicated, the pressure for the goods to arrive on time was high, and I couldn’t fully control what happened once the packages left the printers. I had to organise two separate freight runs to Adelaide by myself. One that got picked up from our office Thursday morning and one that got picked up from the printers Friday midday. Both packages had to arrive by Sunday morning. To make the logistics a bit more complicated a time had to be pre-organised with the arrival destination, otherwise the good would be turned away. The Thursday freight was one box, the Friday freight contained 8 boxes weighing around 10kgs each. I had organised for the same company to do both runs, and had highlighted that the products needed to be air-freighted and had to make it to Adelaide by Sunday. The Thursday freight arrived on Friday without any problems, the Friday freight was set to arrive in Adelaide at 12pm Saturday Perth time. On Friday I received an email saying the freight had been picked up from the printers and was on its way to the air port. At 10am on Saturday I got a call from the freight company, the company had accidentally put the 8 boxes on a truck instead of on a plane and the 8 boxes would not arrive till Monday. These boxes were for a client for a multi-day event, and they had to have the contents of the boxes on Sunday. The freight company said there was nothing they could do, and they wouldn’t be able to specify when on Monday the boxes would arrive.

 At this stage my heart sunk to the floor, I had done everything I thought I could, and now had the task of calling my manager on a Saturday to tell her we had a mini-crisis on our hands. My manager had to call my boss and luckily my boss had changed her flight to Adelaide for a later time and was able to save the day, with the help of the printers. But for one hour I literally thought my life may be over.

After all those weeks of wishing for more responsibility I was suddenly wishing for much less. I was lucky we were able to fix the problem and avoid a crisis.