What a packing list will not tell you about a Georgian warehouse

A packing list is a letter about cartons. It is rarely a letter about rooms. In the Georgian stores we walk, occupancy problems live in the rooms the list never names: the dock overflow that became permanent in November, the cage that shares a lock with returns, the mezzanine that only one shift lead treats as stock.

I still ask for the lists. They tell us which SKU family was supposed to arrive. They do not tell us that aisle four is three places. When the list and the aisle disagree, I write the aisle first and leave the list as a footnote. Finance hates this for a day and then uses it.

If you are preparing for an assessment, do not tidy the overflow before we arrive. The overflow is the finding. A swept dock on the morning of the walk is a kindness to the photographer and a loss to the map.