So I work for a freight forwarder in the shipping industry. Back in 2019 I had a container that had an exam at the port before being put on rail. The exam site had the container out for several days, so the shipping line sent us a detention invoice. Completely unfair as we had no control over how long the exam took, but steamship lines are notorious for billing for things out of your control.
Anyways, accounting did not do their job and give the invoice to me until 2 years later. The steamship line had been trying to collect on it. There were numerous emails from them, but I was not on the thread, so never knew about this invoice. I didn't even know this was for the exam. I saw the container was picked up and delivered to the customer one day, and the empty container returned the following day, so thought this invoice was a mistake.
Accounting emailed them asking what it was for, and forwarded to me their response. However, I missed that email and this invoice was not brought to my attention again until recently. I only found that email on last Friday when I looked further into the situation. Keep in mind the invoice was from 2019 and I was not told of it until last year, and it was not brought to my attention again for another full year.
I emailed our agent overseas and explained the situation and asked how they wanted to handle it as it is too late to collect from the customer. My boss intentionally left the agent on the email (she removed a couple of other people I had added on,) and said we had to cover the expense because I was “careless” and needed to take this as a lesson to learn from.
The only thing I could be blamed for is missing the email from accounting which stated what the charges were for, but even then it is totally understandable. At the time I was coming in to work at 4am almost every day, plus sometimes staying an hour or so after, working 10-12 hrs every day. Every day I was receiving 400-500 emails. It is a certainty that anyone would miss one from time to time. I even pointed out to her that she as well as the other managers in the office miss my emails from time to time, as well as our overseas agents. Yet the bitch continues to put the blame on me.
This has been a theme lately, putting the blame on me for things that were completely out of my control or things that I was specifically told to do in the first place.