Today at the end of the day I was just finishing up what I thought I was going to finish at the same time yesterday when I got a call from down in shipping. They were wondering about their lack of work, so someone had run a report (one of my reports, actually) and found that we had more shipments waiting to go than anyone knew. The system thought a number of orders had dropped for pick that nobody had ever seen.

It is possible, once in a while, for the central database to process a batch drop of orders to pick without the papers actually making it out of the printers. In this case the batch of shipments is left as a file on the main database which I know how to re-trigger. It is not a difficult task but it is esoteric, which is why I was called.

But nobody knew which batch had gone missing. I did not know which batch to re-trigger. I made a guess but nothing happened; it was a batch run with no results. So then A.D. down in shipping started looking through the papers he did have to see which batches had run. He found something from all of the earlier batches so I started trying to re-run the later ones.

But then I noticed that all of the later ones had generated the exact same file size, about a tenth of the size of the batches that we knew had gone through. So then I tried to determine where exactly this missing batch was, and if it was only part of a batch of which some had printed. The shipment numbers on the orders to pick are in sequence, and we could look up these shipment numbers using a little known and little used lookup. By checking a few we found that the sequence on the shipments clearly indicated that the missing shipments were generated after the ones we found.

Thus I had a contradiction: I had shipments which existed on the system and had all the characteristics of a valid shipment on the system; but there was no batch run larger than size zero (effectively) for them to belong to. And the papers had never been seen.

I was stumped. I left it with the high-school co-op to look up each individual shipment number, delete the shipment, and retrigger them.