A logistical nightmare (From The Northern Echo)

A logistical nightmare

10:59am Saturday 8th January 2011 in Chris Lloyd

I HAVE been suffering from logistics. It is an excruciating condition. You may recognise the symptoms. A sufferer has a card in one hand, a phone in the other and repeatedly bangs their head against a brick wall.

Logistics is a word that you only see on lorries.

But “logistics” never travels alone. It is always accompanied by “solutions” or “management”

– grand-sounding words that create a masterful, scientific aura around it in the way that common-sounding words like “deliveryman”

and “on time” would not.

Logistics comes from the Greek word logos, which means reason or rationality.

In ancient Greece, logistics was a military science – it applied thinking to the distribution of troops and supplies. It remained a military word until after the Second World War when it swept like a contagion into civvy street.

I contracted logistics while trying to launch my book one Saturday before Christmas, as shamelessly plugged here, at Rockliffe Hall in Hurworth.

The book left the publishers in Newcastle on the Tuesday and was tipped into a pile of 7,000 snowbound packages in a Durham depot. Via the consignment number, I monitored its nonprogress hourly on the company’s website.

Early Friday, its status changed. In transit!

By mid-afternoon, it hadn’t arrived so I spent 26 minutes on-hold listening to a repetitive snatch of rhythm until logistics control told me they’d sent a message to the driver’s in-cab screen and to his mobile telling him to take the books to the hotel’s reception.

At 5.30pm, with deliveries ending at 6pm, I spent another 17 minutes holding until control told me that the driver had driven the books down the road to Rockliffe but as he’d “been unable to gain access” to a hotel which is open 24/7, he’d driven them back to Durham.

As there was no guarantee of delivery for the 11am launch the following day, a convoy of cars set off at the crack of dawn to Durham where the books were secured to pallets by plastic binding. You might reason that the North-East’s logistical nerve centre would possess a knife, but instead, as the sun rose over the snowfields of Belmont, a man with a flickering flame from a cigarette lighter started melting the plastic until the books were freed.

My symptoms didn’t ease because I was also tracking the progress of a Thomas the Tank Engine from the US that my son wanted for Christmas. Logistics tried to deliver it while we were out, and pushed a card through the letterbox with a number to ring. I rang.

A computerised voice said: “Enter your parcel number now.” But the van driver had not written the parcel number on the card.

“If you do not have your parcel number handy, please phone back when you do,” said the voice, terminating the call.

Every morning I phoned and shouted at the voice that I did not have a parcel number.

Every morning, she cut me off. Eventually, a human overheard and arranged delivery.

Thomas had spent seven days crossing the Atlantic and eight languishing in Stockton waiting to go to Darlington.

He arrived at 11.30am on Christmas Eve, and, relieved, we went out for a few minutes.

We returned to find a card saying another logistics company had failed to make a delivery at 12.15pm. This, it emerged, was a bike from my insurance company (long story; see previous column) even though the insurance company had warned me that delivery was logistically impossible before January 5.

Yet such is the skill of the science of logistics that the impossible had proved possible.

The bike had arrived unannounced, a fortnight early, on Christmas Eve which, logistically speaking, is the busiest day of the year.

Suffering this condition has driven me demented as I try to find logic in logistics.