Pie Tin Drama V. 2.0
The Great Pie Tin Debacle of 2015 continues. Lucky us, indeed. If you recall, over the past year, we've ordered more than 10,000 baby pie tins from an online company on a regular basis. A few weeks ago, our normal shipment of a case of 1,000 was in no way, well, normal. The tins were about 1/8 of an inch different from our regular tin. And in my pre-PJP life, I would have laughed off 1/8 of an inch because who really cares? But now...now 1/8 of an inch makes a big difference in the amount of dough we weigh out for each tin, and most importantly - the tins don't work well with our custom cut dough press.
The pie tin company - webstaurant.com - claimed that we were wrong...that the tins were, in fact, just the same as they ever were (bonus points if Talking Heads lyrics just popped into your head). Finally, after I threw this picture on our Facebook page, I found a kind email in my inbox from the company that admitted perhaps the tins were indeed NOT THE SAME. Yeah, that's what we thought too.
(Note our preferred tin on the left and the tin-masquerading-as-our-tin is on the right.)
I'll spare you the painstaking details of all the emails and online chats regarding 1/8 of an inch, but we finally agreed that if PJP ordered 6,000 tins, the company would find the tins we need directly from the manufacturer and ship them to us so that we would be covered for the next few months. (And if you are interested in the math, 6,000 tins is around $540 plus shipping). No one was quite sure how long it would take to find the 6,000 tins, but best hopes were for four to six weeks. (I'm fairly certain four to six weeks is the standard time estimate for any question. How long to build a factory to make my own pie tins? Four to six weeks. How long to engineer my own metal to make the tins? Four to six weeks. How long will it take me to learn to spell "webstaurant" without help? Four to six weeks.)
After baking 200 baby pies on Monday, our incorrectly sized baby pie tin stash was running dangerously low. We didn't want to order another 1,000 tins in the wrong size, but basically...wrong tins are better than no tins, right? Right.
FedEx showed up with our box of tins this morning. And because even the FedEx guy is all sucked into our pie vortex, he immediately asked me if the box had the right tins inside. I said no...we needed about another three weeks or so and then he would need a dolly to roll 6,000 in through the doors of PJP Buttonwood.
So when I cut the box open, what did I find? THE CORRECT TINS. 1,000 of them...just like a normal day. Just like the wrong tin had never existed. Just like online chats, emails, and photographic evidence of mass shipments of incorrect tins never occurred. Just like no one ever mentioned needing four to six weeks.
And when I contacted the company to ask if I still needed to order the 6,000 tins since the correct ones are obviously back in stock and I have 1,000 now...the customer service person said that he had no idea what was I was talking about because they currently don't have any stock of the correct tins and it will be another four to six weeks before I can expect my shipment of 6,000.
So I've basically spent four to six weeks of my life convincing someone that I received the wrong tins to only end up with the right tins to be told they are the wrong tins? Legit.
