There and Back Again: A Namifiers Tale by Michael Marshall

It's not everyday that your boss call you up and asks, "Do you want to go to L.A. tomorrow?" Of course I had to say yes, who misses this kind of opportunity for adventure? Of course there were a few catches, I would be traveling with Nick, the VP of Sales, and we would be taking down 18 pieces of luggage, filling them up with Wickify race shirts for a Ragnar Marathon, turning around and flying back to L.A, then finally dropping them off in Logan.

So our adventure began...

Chris, my boss/COO of Namifiers, flew down with his wife early that morning. They would then await our shipment of 10,000 shirts to arrive from china, clear customs, and be released from the UPS warehouse. If all went well, there would be no reason for Nick and I to fly down and help out, but the shirts were not released to chris with enough time for him to drive them all to Logan so the next thing I knew, Nick and I were stuffing our suitcases into eachother and preparing them for the flight.

We arrived at the airport with 14 bags, 6 enclosed inside making for a total of 8 bags between 4 people. We pulled up to the skycap, payed $200 in fees to check the extra bags, checked them and then drove our van to the long term parking. Nick and I wern't sure if we were supposed to tip the sky cap guy, so when we got back to the terminal I ran up and gave him $5.

We ate 2 personal pan pizzas from pizza hut, boarded our plane, and we were off to la-la-land. We landed, found our bags, called chris and waited for him. He pulled up in a big white van with no windows on the side; you know, the ones you see the drug dealers/gangsters/bank robbers in the movies pull up in and kidnap the hero...

We went to UPS and waited for hours for them to release our precious cargo and finally 40 min before our return flight they brought it back to us, that is when the mad scramble began. The 4 of us started ripping open the boxes and stuffing shrits into the 18 suitcases as fast as humanly possible. We tried to keep things organized and get an equal amount of womens/mens sizes into the suitcases, but time was running out... When all but 3.5 bags were full we through in a bunch of boxes and the empty bags and started driving back to LAX. While Chris weaved his way through L.A's traffic, Nick and I were in the back frantically trying to get more boxes into the remaining suitcaes.

We were succefull in loading them, pulled up to the L.A. Skycab, found a guy and told him Chris would check our bags as Nick and I dashed off to catch the flight. We made it to the terminal and watched our bags being loaded. We called up Chris and asked him how it went, he told us that the baggage guy said, "you know, I don't have to charge you an extra bag fee for all these bags..."
Chris: "Oh yeah?"
Baggage Guy: You help me, I'll help you.
Chris: "Were is your nearest ATM?"
Chris gave the guy $150 bucks right there to avoid the $700 extra bag fee we were going to have to pay for the 14 extra bags. Gotta love the latin system...

Next Chris went back to UPS where his wife was waiting with the rest of our shirts and they started loading up the van for the drive back to Logan. They couldn't fit all of the boxes in, so they had to take 80% of the shirts out of their boxes and just stuff the van full of them, but amazingly enough they fit every remaining shirt into that van.

Nick and I made it back to SLC with all of our bags filled of an estimated 1800 of the 10,000 shirts. Stacy came to the airport with Max to help watch the bags while Nick watched the van, while I slowly brought the 18 bags out and loaded them up.

We all went to Dee's for some super late dinner and then continued our trek to Logan. We made it to the race around 2 AM where some ragnar race coordinators were waiting. We unpacked all of the shirts and sorted them out into piles of the proper size/gender of the shirts. Then Stacy, Max, and I went to Jer and Barbara's and slept there for a few hours.

The Ragnar people were able to devide up some of the shirts for the early morning runners and then we waited for Chris to show up with the rest of the shirts. I got a call around 9 telling me that he was almost there, so I woke up and went back to the race and helped sort out the rest of the shirts. We not only had to put them into sizes, but then we had to fill up each race teams bag with the requested amount of shirts.

We had one final hiccup in that ragnar only ordered 168 mens XL when they really needed closer to 1680... Pretty big mistake they made but there was nothing we could do as we had filled their order as requested. It sure was frustrating though because it looked to everyone there like it was our fault the shirts that wern't ordered wern't there... I'm not sure what they will end up doing about it, but we may be able to make the rest of the shirts at Namifiers and get them to them by the end of the 188 mile team race from Logan to Park City.

Unfortunaly due to all of the chaos I was only able to get two pictures... I'll post them after I see if anyone else has any more.