So, you discover an item that your life at work just wouldn’t be complete without…  Being that good steward of scarce funding $’s you scour high and low on the interweb to find that most necessary of necessary widgets.  Then you go and fill out the necessary requisition forms (in triplicate!)and submit them…

Then you wait, and wait, and wait…

Finally, after two months of waiting (or is it three now?) somebody returns your phone call…  It seems that despite the fact that vendor A is the cheapest around, they couldn’t order from them.  So supply folks used their list of alternate sources for stuff (after waitng two weeks to reject the order from vendor A) to try and place the order from a different Vendor.  Order gets submitted (after sitting for another week) and hangs around at Vendor B for three weeks, before Vendor B declares that they can’t get the item being ordered….

So after another few weeks goes by (and multiple phone calls and e-mails to the purchasing folks) we get the call from the purchasing folks, “hey we’ve got this two month old purchase request that we still haven’t filled, do you still want this stuff?”   So after several minutes of a one sided conversation (somewhat heated) about customer service, workflow management, with a few repititions of “GET ME MY STUFF” thrown in for good measure…  It seems that the most necessary of necessary widgets has FINALLY been ordered…  For about $50 more per unit than originally priced out at…  And you know it’s been so long since I first did the purchase request that I don’t even know any more just how many widgets I ordered in the first place! :D