What’s wrong with this picture?
Answer? It was taken at 0410 in Harwich ferry port, on the East coast of the UK when Ronald and myself should have been sound asleep in our beds in Noordwijkerhout, NL and London, UK respectively.
Why? A consignment of box lids that was due to come over during Mother’s Day week didn’t materialise and we were going to run out. Given half our orders go out in boxes, to run out of lids during a peak period like Mother’s Day would have been nothing short of a disaster. So Ronald picked up a consignment, jumped in his van and hot footed it to The Hook of Holland, making it just in time to catch the last ferry.
Hooray! I was the lucky one that got the task of driving the 90 miles to the coast to meet him. So, having gone to bed at 11pm I was then back up again at 0215 (with the aid of no less than 6 alarms to wake me!), in the slightly surreal position of driving through late night London revellers, rubbing sleep from my eyes. I made it to Harwich at 0400 to find a virtually deserted port.
Trouble at the border: As I waited for Ronald, I was informed that, even though the port was nearly empty, my van would be destroyed if I didn’t park it in the car park. Rather than pay £2.50 to park for five minutes, I just drove round and round the roundabout instead. This seemed to infuriate the security guard for some reason - perhaps he has shares in the car park company. I decided it wouldn’t be wise to wave at him each time I went round the roundabout. Ronald was with me five minutes later, customs and excise having taken a keen interest in the contents of his van and carried out a thorough search - flowers aren’t the only plants that the Dutch have a reputation for cultivating so I guess the search was no surprise.
Success! With a clean bill of health for Ronald and with my van having survived the officious security guard’s attentions, we loaded up the box lids and headed our separate ways - Ronald back onto the ferry, me in the fast lane to Flowers HQ. I got to our offices at 0555 and 5 minutes later a truck, which had left our warehouse in Holland with a four hour head start on Ronald, pulled in, laden with a bumper load of Mother’s Day flowers. I was very relieved!
Note to self: make sure we have box lids organised well in advance in future!
PS we’re very proud of our boxes…they’re double laminated so they’re super strong - so much so that, as you can see, a grown man (Joseph in this case) can stand on them (so can I and I weigh 85kg).
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Distribution, Mega Days, Mother's Day, Operations on March 6th, 2008
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I thought I would comment here — returning the favour! And favour it is as I have found out only this morning (maybe you knew but.. ) the search engines crawl comments as well as posts.
So to give them something to read (I know it’s all automated but that’s not how my visual intelligence understands what these crawlers do) I thought I’d suggest a category for your website. “Locally grown” or “grown in the UK” would suit those of us who are concerned to reduce carbon footprints. I know that buying from the main markets in the Netherlands and bringing in by ferry is probably using less carbon than road transport from Cornwall or the Scilly Isles but it is a matter of perception.
Hi Hazel
Thanks for the suggestion! We’re always looking at ways to improve our offering. We find people are really keen on the ethical side of our business, so are always looking for ways to make the benefits clearer.