i've been working with my plan to make a small software development company for a while now.

time to implement my plan
Finalizing my plan: Done
Quit my job: Done
Ordering Office Requirements : Shipping
a Server : Shipping
Dozen of Rubber Ducks : Shipping
etc...

so here it is, Day 0; repurposing my bunker to be my small office !

new life, new hope

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

I thought docker was a shipmaker or shipping company until today....

why dont any startup company concern themselves with quality.. oh i hate shipping shitty code.. 😞

Birthday rant !dev
>Be me. Buy 20 doughnuts for everyone in company, two more than there are people working in the office, just to be safe.
>Be one of 5 other people that came to work today. Everyone else either are sick, are working remotely or went on a delegation.
>Watch as 14 doughnuts slowly decay in the kitchen.
Well... At least I've got my package from devRant. Thanks for quick shipping! I only got it today because there was tracking. Fucking post in Poland is shit, they "tried to deliver it yesterday but there weren't anyone at home" even though I was and I haven't even got notice in the mailbox.

Fucking Amazon rant again...

TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.

Me on the phone with their support...

Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.

Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.

Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?

Support: let me put you on hold.

.......

Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?

Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.

Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.

Me: The one by the airport?

Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.

Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?

Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.

Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.

Support: There is nothing I can do sir.

Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?

Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.

Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?

Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.

Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....

Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.

Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?

Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...

Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...

Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.

Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?

Support: sorry

Me: have a nice day.

————

Here are my thoughts as a student of business...

Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.

However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)

Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)

I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.

But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.

Has anyone ever ordered off RedBubble? Are they even a legitimate company?

Rant...

20 days ago I ordered a package from redbubble.com

They shipped the package, without an apartment number. So the delivery was refused and it was sent back to them.

I reach out to support and they ask me to send them a complete mailing address and my order number.

I send them my exact mailing address and the order number as they requested. They inform me that the package is being sent out again ASAP.

This morning I see that the new package has shipped, WITH NO FUCKING APARTMENT NUMBER.

I email them to let them know this. They inform me that since it has my zip code it will be fine (which is a ridiculously stupid this to say).

So I actually call the post service and ask them if the address will work, they let me know that of course, it will not get to me if there is no apartment. Duh!

So, I email RedBubble support again to let them know this.

I expect some sort of answer as to why this is happening. But the following happens.

They send me a refund.

Let's be clear, I did not as for a refund. I asked for the order I made to be shipped to me.

So it seems that putting an apartment number on a shipping address is completely impossible for this very unprofessional company.

After 2 weeks of bullshit, I will be receiving nothing at all from these shady cunts.

Fuck RedBubble it seems.

This hasn’t been posted yet?

The Boring Company Flamethrower is renamed to The Boring Company not a Flamethrower because of shipping problems :D

I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.

Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.

The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.

Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.

This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad.

MARKETING IS A MENACE FOR SOCIETY and a large waste of time and resources.

Imagine that for some very stupid reason people were allowed to steal cell phones from unsuspecting victims and sell it on open market legally, tax invoices and all.

One could create a business like this. Steal some lad's brand new $600 iPhone and sell it for $280, because why not?

That is marketing. A company goes and makes a phone for lets say $180. Add in taxes, shipping and development costs, and we get to $300. Put some real nice profits on top (let's say 40%) and we get to $420.
The last 180 are the cost of marketing for society.

Today some stupid marketing conmen goosesteps into my lab and says that we must use Tensorflow and in-memory databases and multicloud redundancy and, I kid you not, "profound learning".
WE HAVE A FREAKING LOGISTICS OPS APPLICATION.
"We are putting it on the brochure, those technologies are set to sell well in our core market, and improve employer-branding" says the conmen.

A request for a feature is one thing, a request for an whole other technology because some snake-oil salesmen read the term in some clickbait rag and thinks that some starry-eyed moneyhead will pay extra because the brochure says "NOW WITH 2X MORE TECH!" is just an assault on society.

[...] great! Nice to hear from you that you've got experience using C#! Our shipping company will also need a mobile interface for our IBM AS400 relic older-than-the-pyramids server, can you do that?

Me (a little displeased about the idea of working on a pre-existing legacy server): yes sure, I'm working on a Android project right now, so I'm learning a lot about it lately, I think it's totally feasible

Them: oh, but we are using a windows mobile device

Me (wondering why they are still using Windows phone): I can look it up and let you know btw

> Windows Mobile /= Windows Phone
> Deprecated since 2010

I'm fucked.

A new head of operations joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need 500 warehouses across the country — we might need that capacity. We will build them rather than renting them — Amazon does the same thing, so we should too. We also need our own shipping fleet — FedEx has that too, so it’s a battle-tested approach. We might need that capacity. We need a future-proof solution.
— Uh… That’s kind of dumb. Are you kidding me?

A new head of engineering joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need an AWS cluster running Kubernetes deploying microservices built with Docker. We might need autoscaling. Frontend should be Next.js + TypeScript — everyone does that now, plus we can develop a React Native app more easily if need be. We need a future-proof solution.
— Wow! That’s what I call a good manager. You really know what you’re talking about. You’re promoted!

Couple of jobs back we got bought out by that massive shipping company with the red and yellow colors.

We used macs and some high up moron decided it was a good idea to put on domain policy restrictions on our macs, but developers can't work without admin access so if we wanted to keep said admin access, we had to sign a written agreement indicating that we were not allowed to do certain thing, like change our wallpaper or install personal music players, you know like Spotify, which at the time was what most of us used.

Now this was just a nice cherry on the cake of stupid descision that was making me rethink working there. Thanks to the high demand for skilled front ends, it was 11 am when we got this, 3pm I had comnfirmed my interview for the next day.

An hour later our manager called us all in to explain this was BS formalities. Well too fucking late, learn to communicate you dumb shit.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is another...

A developer purposely forged international shipping documents by 'hard-coding' data to get around international shipping restrictions (ex. we can't sell 'Widgets' to Germany...so under the category he would replace the value with 'light bulb'). He was 'under pressure' to make keep the money rolling in no matter what.

We were eventually 'caught', fined over $300,000 (which was better than the $10,000 per offense and we had thousands of offenses).

For this major frack-up, 'Rob' was promoted to manager of the International department, got to travel (including his wife) to several European countries, and eventually obtained a company-paid MBA degree.

'Rob' liked to joke about how he would sometimes have to pinch himself how lucky he was by working for such stupid people (yes, he used the word 'stupid') and how gullible government investigators were.
"All I had to do was say 'its a bug in Windows' or some other kind of nonsense and they believed me."

'Rob' quit 3 months after receiving his MBA degree (again, 100% company paid) and the international department closed due to some potential illegal activity.

I am a bad developer. I know nothing. I had a very simple requirement just to change the strings.
I couldn't collect all the requirements. I connected with PM offline, slow replies and miscommunications. Ahh!! How will I be shipping bigger projects? I have 3 years of development, in my last company we worked totally different though.
So, at the time when I thought I will be raising a PR I am stuck on the requirements.
I am a dumb shit. I can't do anything right. A simple requirement I am not able to deliver. I am so embarassed. :(

Project name - "JIRA 2.0"
Description - JIRA seems to not be informing people in our company about much of anything right now. Engineers don't know how to find anything. PMs don't know when things are shipping.

Me: JIRA, you had 1 job!

I had a dream about AI.

I was contracted at a company that did some dodgy things. One of the things they "produced" was train car covers. They said the beauty of "selling" these is that they only showed that they shipped them to customers, despite never shipping them. This allowed the customers to take credit for covering their train cars to meet some environmental quota. It was a racket to satisfy someones auditing books somewhere.

Well my specialty was AI systems. I provided various types of AI for them to use to run their scams. However, there was a rule. I was not allowed to sell them or bring onsite any level 5 or above AIs. Level 5 or above AIs were AIs capable of independent thought. Not sure what levels were below, but I can imagine level 1 was probably pattern matching. Level 2 maybe can make decisions based upon rule sets.

As the dream progressed I found myself smuggling a level 5 AI onsite by combining 2 lower level AIs with complementary systems. Once "hooked up" they would act as a single level 5 AI. Not sure if I was working on some sort of industrial espionage or undercover for some sort of legal agency. I woke up too soon to find out who I really was.

What is it with shipping websites sending you an email saying "hey, here's your tracking number and tracking URL!" and then that *very same link* saying "this tracking number doesn't exist, it can take a few days to show up sometimes, try again!" I'd understand if this was one knock-off weird company, but it seems to be *all of them*.

Seriously, how hard is it to just initialise a tracking number at the point you send that email so it at least shows a "parcel not yet picked up" or similar message? I know it doesn't make much material difference to tracking but it just reeks of bad UX and lazy / incompetent devs.

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.

Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.

I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.

After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!

After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.

So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.

Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.

Before I came along, my company was processing orders of type X by hand, taking many hours and being at greater risk of human error. So as a temporary solution, I crafted a console app to do the processing. Then, this app is needed to be accessed remotely. Because adding a newer .NET to a handful of servers was just too much to handle emotionally for management, the console app was revamped to a web app. During this revamping process, I was having my client send me an email so that I could initiate the processing myself until a friendlier UI was available. Well, I finished last night. I sent them an email explaining that it was live, gave them the address, and gave myself a high-five. A moment ago, I get an email from the client insisting that I process those orders quickly so that I don't cause a delay in shipping. FML!! Did they even READ the email I sent them?? They've been suckling at the teat for too long. Adding insult to injury, since the revamping project began, the client would CC my boss every time they emailed to have an order processed as if to hint at their frustration that the project wasn't done yet. Grr....

!rant

Frontend people, I need your opinion.

I will soon start building the next version of a rather large project's frontend but I am mostly a backend guy.

It is a custom made web application (PHP, Postgres) that handles all business aspects of a shipping company of about 50 people (trucks, truck free space in shipments for new packages, package tracking via gps on the truck, invoicing, reselling shipping services to other businesses, everything).

The existing frontend is using an ancient version (1.x) of the YUI framework and uses AJAX heavily to refresh the user interface. It's usable, but maintaining and extending it is getting really hard as the project grows larger and larger and more systems are integrated.

So the question is, given this use case, what JS framework do I use and what is a good resource to start learning it?

Shipping company sending e-mails regarding cases to our ex-Intercom addresses instead of our registerd contact e-mail.

Intercom was turned off months ago.
I can not reach any old communication.

Of course certain claims expire... and we're ending up with sad and mad customers.
Let me be the shitpole to fix it... again.

FML, where's my long awaited customer service colleague!? /sadface

Part of one of the workarounds for Dirty COW is to disable ptrace.

ptrace is generally needed by debuggers.

I am team lead for L2 support at a company which makes a debugger.

RedHat are now shipping this workaround.

*ducks for cover*

Hey fellow devs,

i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.

little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:

i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.

BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)

BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.

I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.

The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)

PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!

Thanks for reading, potato potato

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?

I've ordered hardware like 24 days ago. Shipping company lost the package and I've just got confirmation the to see my money I have to wait another 20+ days. FML