Just tells you how horrible logistics of physical products are. Digital world removed many of the hands that touched the box previously from manufacturing, to warehouse, shipping and then the retail shop especially. Everyone in the chain needing to be paid or taking their own cut. Digital is so much simpler.
I've had that in academia, and in my current (medium-sized) company, where rules and processes aren't as stringent as I know they are in BigCorps. My partner works for a consultancy firm (where she, in part, arranges travel for various people), and they do that too. I guess I assumed that (very fair-seeming) practice is more widespread than it actually is. My condolences to all of you.
Edit: I just remembered a totally silly travel situation during my academic career. The school sent me to an academic conference in an interesting location, and I wanted to stay for an extra week to do some touristing. (It was during summer vacation, and golly do I miss those.)
No one had any problem with it, and they told me standard practice was for me to call the airline and pay the $250 (or whatever it was) change fee. No problem, until I noticed that tickets with the new return date would be something like $400 less than the original dates. No tickets had yet been purchased, so I suggested that they buy me those dates directly: everyone would win.
Except... "Sorry, we can't do that." Huh? "Travel must be +/- 2 days of the conference dates."
I presented the situation to my department chair, hoping for an intervention, but she sighed, and said that those people were impossible to deal with. "But, it's the end of the fiscal year, and I have some extra budget [somewhere], so submit a reimbursement form for the $250, and I'll sign it."
Huge congratulations to JKB, Frode, Kim, and the rest of the Vespa team! We are infinitely grateful for all of your help and advice. We are lucky enough to have Vespa as the foundation for our developer-focused enterprise search product.
Having worked with both Solr and Elastic in past search companies, it’s incredible to be able to deploy into Fortune 50 enterprises without any doubts about stability and with all the benefits of a cutting-edge hybrid engine.
Can’t wait to watch you on the next leg of your journey!
