I built what I came to call the exception log: a running document, started in a spreadsheet and migrated to our internal system when we got one, that tracked every deviation from standard delivery windows, every carrier substitution, every client-side requirement that didn’t fit our default process. It started because I needed to stop answering the same question twice. It ended up being the institutional memory of eighteen years of freight coordination.
Some of the entries were mundane. “Alder Home Supply requires a minimum two-hour delivery window notification for any appointment-based merchandise. Carrier must confirm at T-minus 48 hours.” That’s entry three from March 2016, transcribed from a conversation I had with Diane Keller during the first year we had the Alder account, after a carrier arrived without notice and a receiving manager had to extend her shift.
Some of the entries were more complicated. A multi-carrier exception that took me three days to untangle in 2018, involving a delayed international shipment, a miscommunicated port clearance, and a client who needed product for a holiday sales window. I resolved it. I wrote the resolution into the protocol. I moved on.
This is what eighteen years of freight coordination looks like from the inside: an unbroken chain of problems solved and lessons documented and relationships maintained, stretching across enough years that you stop seeing it as effort and start seeing it as the job.
I loved the job. This is important to say, because the rest of the story can make it sound like I was a grudging soldier in someone else’s war. I wasn’t. I was genuinely good at it, and I found genuine satisfaction in it, and I had convinced myself that being good at something and finding satisfaction in it and contributing it to a family company was enough of an arrangement.